Caste, Class, and Campus: Conversations Indian Colleges Aren't Having

Indian college campuses reflect deep caste and class diversity, yet conversations about privilege, belonging, and inequality remain absent. This piece explores how structural gaps shape student experiences and what institutions and students can do to make inclusion meaningful beyond reservation numbers.

The Inequality Hiding in Plain Sight

Indian college campuses contain some of the most economically and socially diverse groups of young people anywhere in the world — students from wealthy urban families attending alongside students from rural SC/ST households on reservation seats, students from elite English-medium schools alongside first-generation college-goers who navigated the system in regional-language mediums. This diversity is extraordinary and largely unremarked upon. The conversations that would make it meaningful — about power, privilege, belonging, and what equity in education actually requires — are almost entirely absent from formal academic life.

The Diversity That Exists and the Belonging That Does Not

India's reservation system — one of the world's oldest and most extensive affirmative action frameworks — has significantly increased the presence of students from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, and Other Backward Class backgrounds in higher education institutions. This is a genuine achievement. The representation on paper is real.

What is less real is the sense of belonging that should accompany it. Research on the campus experiences of first-generation college students and students from reserved category backgrounds at Indian institutions consistently documents a set of experiences that are difficult to discuss openly: academic unpreparedness produced by school systems that failed them, social isolation from peers who do not share their cultural or economic background, subtle and sometimes overt caste discrimination from faculty and fellow students, and institutional cultures that were designed for and by a different kind of student.

These experiences are not hypothetical. Students from Dalit and Adivasi backgrounds at elite institutions have written about them — in personal essays, in campus newspapers, in the testimony that follows whenever a student from these backgrounds drops out, struggles academically, or, in the most tragic cases, dies. Rohith Vemula's death at the University of Hyderabad in 2016 and the broader movement it catalysed made this conversation briefly visible at the national level. It has since retreated to the margins again.

The Class Dimension That Overlaps but Is Not Identical

Caste and class in India are related but not the same. Significant numbers of upper-caste students are not wealthy; significant numbers of OBC and SC students have moved into middle-class economic security over generations. The classroom encounters both dimensions simultaneously.

The class gap on campuses manifests in ways that are sometimes more visible than caste: who has laptops, who can afford to eat at the campus canteen regularly, who has the kind of cultural capital — knowledge of how to navigate institutional systems, confidence with authority figures, English-language fluency — that makes college easier regardless of academic ability.

First-generation college students — those whose parents did not attend college, a category that overlaps significantly but not entirely with reserved category students — face a specific set of challenges that colleges rarely acknowledge: they have no family model for how college works, no one at home to advise them on internships, graduate school, or professional networking, and no safety net if the college experience goes badly.

What Campuses Are (Not) Doing

Most Indian college administrations treat diversity as a compliance matter — the reservation seats are filled, the boxes are ticked — rather than as a pedagogical and institutional challenge that requires active investment.

The investment that would actually make a difference: mentorship programmes specifically for first-generation students, mental health support that understands the specific stressors of navigating class and caste difference on campus, faculty training that addresses unconscious bias in academic assessment, and curriculum that includes the history and contemporary reality of caste rather than pretending it is irrelevant to any subject.

Student initiatives are sometimes more ambitious than institutional ones. Ambedkar Study Circles on campuses across India create spaces for students from Dalit backgrounds to build community, discuss their experiences, and access mentorship from older students. These organisations exist because the institution has not provided what they offer.

The Conversation Students Can Have

None of this requires waiting for institutional change. Individual students can choose to have the conversations their campuses are avoiding.

For students from privileged backgrounds: active curiosity about the experiences of peers from different backgrounds — not charity or pity, but genuine interest and willingness to hear uncomfortable things about the institution you both attend. Examining your own assumptions about merit, preparation, and belonging.

For students from disadvantaged backgrounds: knowing your rights — the specific rights and protections that the constitution and university regulations provide, the redressal mechanisms that exist even when they are not publicised. Building communities of support with peers who share your experience. Documenting discrimination when it occurs.

The conversation is uncomfortable. It is also necessary — not as a political exercise, but as the basic work of building an institution where the diversity that exists on paper translates into the belonging that makes education actually work.