IIM Ahmedabad adamant to not implement ST, SC & OBC quota for 2020 admissions to Ph.D course

Despite growing criticism for not implementing reservations for historically marginalised social groups in this year’s Ph.D programme in Management, Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) has not yet notified the Government of India (GoI) reservation quota policy norms through its website.

IIM Ahmedabad last week had issued an advertisement inviting applications for its PhD programme, which didn’t mention anything about reservation for SC, ST and OBC students.

The institute is under fire for not making provisions to implement reservation policy and refusal to comply with the law that requires all Central Educational Institutions (CEI) to reserve seats for each course and branch of study.

“The IIM Act, 2017, which gave unprecedented autonomy to the IIMs and enables them to grant the Ph.D degree in the first place, also makes it explicitly clear that they must comply with the provisions of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006,” Siddharth Joshi, an IIM-B alumni said in an open letter to IIM-A director Errol D’Souza.

According to observers, it’s not the first time the IIM Ahmedabad has chosen to ignore reservation in its PhD programme. In the past also it deliberately ignored the affirmative action policies both in admissions of students and faculty recruitment.

Out of 20 IIMs, IIM Ahmedabad is the only institution which deliberately ignored the constitutional provisions of reservation in its PhD admission process of 2020, which are mandated by the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admissions) Act, 2006.

IIM Ahmedabad not only triggered the anger among the prospective scholars of the SC, ST and Other Backward Classes (OBC) but also aggrieved the scholars who argue that the social diversity necessarily doesn’t lead to inefficiency.

The information provided in the table below gives the exact position of other IIMs in affirmative action policy norms in its PhD admissions for 2020, collected through respective IIM websites. Of all 20 IIMs, 6 IIMs have started PhD admissions for 2020 and of these 6 IIMs, 5 IIMs have mentioned the Government of India’s reservation norms in their respective websites except the 1 IIM Ahmedabad.

In other 14 IIMs, 12 IIMs have not yet released their admission processes for the 2020 PhD programs and the remaining 2 IIMs have no PhD programs in their institutions.

This incident also brought in the limelight the problems of class and caste identities, social diversity and the representation that are largely becoming evident in our higher educational institutional academic spaces through social differences of caste.