In January 2026, the University Grants Commission released its new regulations aimed at creating a more inclusive academic environment and providing a structure to challenge discriminatory practices within higher education institutions. Unlike the largely advisory 2012 regulations, these rules mark a significant shift by placing formal responsibility for compliance squarely on institutional leadership—Vice Chancellors, Registrars, Principals—rather than treating discrimination as a peripheral problem to be handled through token grievance mechanisms. Predictably, this development has been welcomed by many as evidence of progress.
But these regulations are not being read in a political vacuum. They arrive in the month of Rohith Vemula’s Shahadat Diwas—a reminder that caste annihilation in universities has never been a question of administrative intent, but of institutional violence, denial, and impunity. It is in this charged moment that the Campaign for the Rohith Act has also released its draft legislation: the Karnataka Rohith Vemula (Prevention of Exclusion and Injustice in Higher Education Institutions) Bill, 2025. This draft, developed by anti-caste practitioners with sustained inputs from lawyers, academicians, researchers, student activists, and social justice organizations, is not merely a response to episodic discrimination but a political intervention into the Brahminical structure of Indian academia itself.
Both the Karnataka and Telangana governments have indicated their intent to adapt and table versions of this draft in their respective state legislatures. This makes a comparative reading urgent—not to ask which framework is more administratively efficient, but to examine how these two instruments—one regulatory and national, the other legislative and explicitly anti-caste—understand discrimination, justice, institutional power, and accountability. What follows is an attempt to read them against each other, to foreground the strengths of comprehensive anti-caste frameworks, and to assess what it means to legislate equality in spaces historically organized to deny it.
The University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026
The University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, effective from January 13, 2026, supersede the 2012 regulations and aim to eradicate discrimination in all higher education institutions across India based on religion, race, caste, gender, place of birth, or disability. The regulations mandate every HEI to establish an Equal Opportunity Centre overseen by an Equity Committee, which must include representation from faculty, staff, civil society, and students, with mandatory representation of Other Backward Classes, Persons with Disabilities, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and women. The Centre is responsible for implementing policies for disadvantaged groups, providing guidance and counselling, maintaining an online portal for reporting discrimination incidents, publishing bi-annual reports, and coordinating with civil society, legal services authorities, and government agencies. HEIs must also operate round-the-clock Equity Helplines, designate Equity Ambassadors across campus units, and deploy mobile Equity Squads to monitor vulnerable areas.
The regulations establish comprehensive procedures for handling discrimination complaints, requiring the Equity Committee to meet within 24 hours of receiving a report and submit findings to the Head of the Institution within 15 working days, who must then take action within 7 working days. Aggrieved persons can appeal to the Ombudsperson within 30 days if dissatisfied with the Equity Committee’s report. All stakeholders must sign undertakings to promote equity and refrain from discrimination, and HEIs must conduct orientation programmes, display awareness materials, and ensure transparent, non-discriminatory practices in admissions, hostel allocations, and classroom arrangements. The UGC will establish a national-level monitoring committee to oversee implementation and may visit campuses to review progress. Non-compliance can result in severe consequences, including debarment from UGC schemes, prohibition from offering degree programmes or ODL/online courses, removal from the UGC’s recognized institutions list under Sections 2(f) and 12B, or additional punitive actions determined on a case-by-case basis.
The regulations place significant operational responsibility on smaller institutions, particularly colleges, which may lack the faculty strength to independently establish Equal Opportunity Centres and must therefore rely on their affiliating universities’ infrastructure. Confidentiality protections run throughout the framework, allowing complainants and witnesses to request anonymity while reporting incidents, and the regulations explicitly provide protection against retaliation for those who report discrimination. These provisions apply uniformly across all modes of higher education delivery, encompassing traditional classroom-based learning as well as Open and Distance Learning and online programmes, thereby extending the equity mandate across India’s diverse higher education landscape.
The Karnataka Rohith Vemula (Prevention of Exclusion and Injustice in Higher Education Institutions) Bill, 2025
The Karnataka Rohith Vemula (Prevention of Exclusion and Injustice in Higher Education Institutions) Bill, 2025, is a proposed state legislation drafted by anti-caste activists aimed at comprehensively addressing caste-based discrimination and harassment against Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe students, faculty, and staff in all higher educational institutions across Karnataka, whether public, private, or charitable. The Bill defines discrimination to include both direct and indirect discrimination, where actions appear neutral but have adverse effects on SC/ST individuals, and institutional discrimination embedded in the structures, policies, and governing bodies of educational institutions. It recognizes caste-based harassment as any hostile behavior expressed verbally, non-verbally, or digitally that humiliates or demeans individuals due to their SC/ST status, and importantly establishes a constitutional “right to overcome caste prejudice” grounded in Article 21, allowing SC/ST individuals to organize collectively, refuse participation in caste-reinforcing activities, exercise informational autonomy over their caste identity, and maintain confidentiality regarding their SC/ST status without facing penalties or negative appraisals.
The Bill mandates the establishment of Equity Committees in every higher educational institution, with a unique composition requirement that at least 80 percent of members must be from SC/ST communities, including a Presiding Officer from SC/ST backgrounds above the rank of Assistant Professor, faculty and staff members, NGO representatives experienced in anti-caste work, and two SC/ST student representatives, with at least one woman. These committees are empowered with civil court–like powers to summon witnesses, require document production, and conduct inquiries that must be completed within ninety days of receiving a complaint. The Bill establishes a dual-track system where aggrieved persons can approach the Equity Committee within three months of an incident, with provisions for conciliation if requested, or directly approach the High Court in cases of institutional discrimination. An appellate body consisting of a member qualified to be a judge and a member with educational or social work experience from SC/ST communities hears appeals within ninety days, with possible extensions not exceeding six months in total. Notably, the Bill requires that if prima facie evidence of an atrocity under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act or other penal laws emerges, the Equity Committee or appropriate authority must assist in filing a police complaint within seven days, while maintaining that inquiry and remedies under this Act proceed independently of criminal proceedings.
The Bill prescribes detailed remedies and penalties proportionate to the severity of violations, offering aggrieved persons administrative interventions to nullify adverse effects, reasonable accommodations, monetary compensation determined based on mental trauma and loss of opportunity, and counselling support. For respondents found guilty of harassment, penalties range from written warnings and mandatory caste-sensitization workshops to severe consequences, including suspension during inquiry, debarment from supervisory duties, denial of contract renewal, stopping of increments, demotion, dismissal, and salary deductions payable to the aggrieved person, with provisions for recovery as land revenue arrears if unpaid. Student respondents face penalties including hostel debarment, exam withholding, suspension, and expulsion, while higher educational institutions violating the Act face fines up to ten lakh rupees and potential withdrawal of state financial aid. The Bill imposes comprehensive institutional duties requiring HEIs to adopt caste-blind admission processes where feasible, provide reasonable accommodations and structured academic support for SC/ST students, conduct mandatory diversity workshops, avoid delays in scholarship disbursement, reduce arbitrariness in policies, ensure SC/ST students are informed of all opportunities, not perpetuate stereotypes through syllabi or customs, and pay compensation to legal heirs if an SC/ST individual from the institution dies by suicide. Schedule I of the Bill enumerates thirty specific discriminatory actions, including probing family occupation during admissions in ways that humiliate SC/ST candidates, segregating SC/ST individuals in classrooms, excluding them from extracurricular activities or academic engagements, applying biased assessment practices, arbitrarily changing rules to their disadvantage, and occupational steering toward fields deemed “suitable” for them.
The Bill establishes a multi-layered enforcement architecture involving institutional Equity Committees, a specialized appellate body with quasi-judicial powers, District Officers to monitor implementation and maintain data, and appropriate state government authorities to publicize the Act and conduct training programs for committee members, demonstrating a comprehensive regulatory framework that extends beyond complaint redressal to encompass preventive measures, awareness generation, structural reform of institutional practices, confidentiality protections against retaliation, legal aid provisions for students unable to afford counsel, and explicit recognition that overcoming caste prejudice is a constitutionally protected right integral to dignity and personal development in educational spaces.
Reading the Two Frameworks Against Each Other: Spirit, Power, and Consequence
At a surface level, both the UGC Regulations and the Rohith Vemula Bill appear to share a commitment to equity, institutional responsibility, and procedural responsiveness. But this apparent convergence quickly collapses under closer scrutiny. What separates them is not drafting technique but political imagination: how caste is understood, how harm is conceptualized, and how justice is meant to be delivered in spaces historically structured by Brahminical power.
The UGC Regulations operate within a liberal-universalist framework. Caste appears as one category among many—religion, gender, disability—flattened into a general language of inclusion. This in itself is not a problem, since there are intersectional structures that affect members of the academic community. However, given the history of caste-blindness specifically in these spaces, there is something to be said about the specificity of caste focus in the Rohith Vemula Bill, which anti-caste activists have attempted to install. The bigger problem lies in how the UGC treats discrimination as a deviation from institutional norms, something to be corrected through better procedures, faster timelines, and visible compliance structures. The emphasis is on management: committees, portals, helplines, ambassadors, squads. Even the strongest sanctions—derecognition, withdrawal of funding—remain exceptional and remote, deployed rarely and at the discretion of the same state apparatus that has historically shielded universities from accountability.
The Rohith Vemula Bill begins from an entirely different premise. It treats caste not as an identity-based vulnerability but as a historically entrenched system of power that organizes academic life itself—who teaches, who evaluates, who is believed, who is dispensable. By explicitly naming institutional discrimination and indirect discrimination, the Bill refuses the fiction of neutrality that universities so often invoke. It recognizes that exclusion is not always spectacular or abusive, but routine, procedural, and normalized through rules that appear fair while producing casted outcomes.
This divergence is most evident in how representation is imagined. The UGC mandates diversity within committees, presuming that proportional presence will yield fairness. The Bill mandates SC/ST decisional dominance. This is not symbolism; it is an acknowledgement of how consensus is manufactured in academic spaces, and how “balanced” committees routinely reproduce upper-caste common sense under the guise of neutrality. The Bill does not seek representation within Brahminical structures—it seeks to interrupt them.
Similarly, the two frameworks differ sharply in their understanding of justice. Under the UGC Regulations, justice is largely procedural: complaints are to be acknowledged, inquiries completed, reports submitted, actions taken. What remains unaddressed is whether the harm has been meaningfully repaired. The Rohith Vemula Bill, by contrast, centers material consequences. It authorizes compensation for mental trauma and loss of opportunity, salary recovery from perpetrators, institutional fines, suspension during inquiry, and the stripping of supervisory power. Discrimination here is not merely a violation of conduct; it is a redistributive question, requiring correction in material and institutional terms.
Perhaps the most radical departure lies in the Bill’s articulation of a constitutional right to overcome caste prejudice. Grounded in Article 21, this formulation reframes caste discrimination as an assault on dignity, autonomy, and the very possibility of self-making within educational spaces. It recognizes the right to refuse caste-reinforcing practices, to control the disclosure of caste identity, and to organize collectively without reprisal. Nothing in the UGC Regulations approaches this depth of constitutional engagement. Where the UGC seeks compliance, the Bill asserts freedom. The Bill is here able both to draw on the constitutional legacy of social justice and to expand its scope in articulation.
The handling of extreme harm further exposes this gap. The UGC Regulations remain silent on institutional liability in cases of student death by suicide, maintaining the familiar posture of tragedy without causation. The Rohith Vemula Bill explicitly rejects this narrative. By mandating compensation to legal heirs, it refuses to allow institutions to disavow responsibility and insists that caste violence, even when slow and bureaucratic, is still violence.
Taken together, the contrast is stark. The UGC Regulations represent an administrative liberalism—well-intentioned, procedurally elaborate, but politically cautious and structurally non-confrontational. The Rohith Vemula Bill represents anti-caste constitutionalism: unapologetically specific, materially enforceable, and grounded in the historical truth that Indian universities have never been neutral spaces of knowledge, but sites of graded exclusion.
This is not a question of one instrument replacing the other. But if the goal is to meaningfully transform academic spaces rather than merely regulate them, it is the Rohith Vemula Bill that confronts caste where it actually lives—in evaluation, authority, silence, and impunity—rather than where it is easiest to administratively acknowledge. The argument, of course, is not that a regulatory body that caters to different axes of power is not necessary, but that perhaps more such Bills that tackle different structures of oppression are necessary at similar levels. Drawing from the legislative activist history of feminist politics, especially the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, the Bill also provides a map for more intervention-focused possibilities.
The draft could be further strengthened by explicitly naming and regulating caste–precarity linkages, recognising how contractual faculty positions, ad hoc appointments, fellowships, and project-based employment have become key sites where caste exclusion is reproduced under the language of flexibility and merit. It would also benefit from treating data as an instrument of accountability rather than mere monitoring, by mandating publicly accessible, anonymised caste-disaggregated data on admissions, evaluations, fellowships, dropouts, and disciplinary actions, and recognising opacity and non-disclosure as forms of institutional discrimination. Finally, the Bill could more clearly foreclose institutional retaliation by design, through an explicit bar on counter-litigation, parallel disciplinary proceedings, or academic reprisals against complainants and witnesses during the pendency of inquiries—one of the most common tactics through which universities neutralise anti-caste claims without ever addressing them.
Disproportionate SC/ST student suicides and mass dropouts across higher education institutions reveal caste discrimination not as an aberration but as a pervasive social problem rooted in historical exclusion and sustained by contemporary institutional practices. These outcomes emerge from everyday academic processes—evaluation, notions of merit, access to resources, representation, and belonging—where caste operates through routine, normalized, and often covert forms of exclusion rather than only through overt acts of violence. Existing frameworks such as affirmative action, criminal law, and earlier UGC regulations have proven inadequate to address this structural harm, making a civil, preventive, and remedial legal intervention necessary.
Seen in this light, the Bill constitutes a significant and overdue political step: it translates decades of lived experience, constitutional commitment, and movement knowledge into a legal architecture that locates caste violence within the institution itself and demands accountability from universities not as neutral spaces of learning, but as sites where dignity, fraternity, and equality must be actively produced. The UGC would benefit from reading this draft carefully if it actually wishes to create more substantial equality on campuses.
Anti-Caste Legislation under State Power
It is also important to situate these developments within the present political moment. With the Congress in opposition at the national level, its governments in Karnataka and Telangana have strong political incentives to endorse and foreground anti-caste articulations that distinguish them from the ruling dispensation. Supporting an anti-caste legislative framework allows the party to consolidate its Bahujan base in South India, draw upon its historical association with social justice politics in the region, and align with the broader narrative of constitutional equality and inclusion that it is presently seeking to reclaim as a national counterpoint. In this sense, the willingness to table such legislation is both politically expedient and ideologically legible within the Congress’s regional history and current commitments.
Yet acknowledging this conjuncture should not slide into political naïveté about the nature of law or the state itself. Endorsement from a party in power at the state level, even one invoking social justice, does not automatically resolve deeper questions about how such laws function once absorbed into bureaucratic and administrative systems. The machinery of the state has its own logics—of delay, dilution, and depoliticization—that often blunt the transformative potential of radical demands, even when those demands are momentarily taken up by sympathetic governments.
It is from this awareness that a more difficult set of questions must be held open. The first concerns implementation. Indian universities have perfected the art of procedural compliance without structural change: committees are constituted, reports are generated, training is conducted, while caste power quietly migrates to less visible sites of authority and discretion. In such a context, even a carefully drafted law risks being reduced to symbolic adherence unless it is accompanied by sustained pressure from students, teachers, staff, and movements operating both within and beyond institutional frameworks.
A second concern follows closely. Expanding the regulatory and quasi-judicial reach of the state within campuses also concentrates power in an apparatus that has historically—and especially currently—been ambivalent, and at times actively hostile, to anti-caste and dissenting student politics. Administrative tools designed to secure equity can, under different political conditions, be repurposed to surveil, discipline, or manage unrest rather than dismantle hierarchy. Naming this tension does not weaken the case for such legislation; it sharpens it. While the law can disrupt impunity and open space, it cannot be mistaken for the horizon of justice itself—and every expansion of state power, even in the language of social justice, must be met with vigilance rather than trust alone.
Ultimately, the question before us is not whether universities will speak the language of equity, but whether they will be forced to surrender the power that caste has long exercised within them. The UGC regulations offer administrative reassurance; the Rohith Vemula Bill issues a political challenge. One manages discrimination, the other names it as violence; one promises better procedures, the other demands consequences. To read these interventions in the shadow of Rohith Vemula’s institutional murder is to be reminded that confronting caste is not a question of intent or timing, but of urgency—and that the struggle to dismantle it in the academy has already been delayed for far too long.
Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.
