In the media
Professor Ashwini Deshpande writes opinion piece on discrimination in Indian universities

Ashwini Deshpande has written an opinion piece based on her recent WIDER Working Paper in the Indian independent journalism site The Wire. She writes about the widespread prevalence of discriminatory attitudes towards quota students in India that was brought to the fore by the tragic suicide in early 2016 of student Rohit Vemula.

Professor Deshpande draws on her paper ‘Double jeopardy? Caste, affirmative action, and stigma’ to support the argument that affirmative action can only be one link in a chain of policies that need to be designed to battle caste disadvantage.

The paper shows that there are no significant differences in the effort and academic attitudes between ‘quota students’ and those who get into open seats and that there is a need for establishing an antidiscriminatory apparatus inside institutions to counter stigmatizing attitudes against those admitted on the basis of affirmative action.

An extract from the article

‘Affirmative action via quotas is a way of ensuring access to higher education and good jobs to those who would otherwise be excluded. However, quotas are only the starting point – the real challenge lies in how well beneficiaries are able to integrate within institutions into which they gain entry’.

Read it full in here.