Recovering Caste Privilege: The Politics of Meritocracy at the Indian Institutes of Technology (original) (raw)
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This paper, based on policy documents of the Indian government and the UNESCO archives in Paris, tries to sketch the underlying dynamics of the decision to invest in a technologically intensive mode of modernisation in India in the 1950s by briefly focusing on the politics behind the setting up of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), specifically, IIT Kharagpur (1950, IIT status in 1951. This process had both national and international dimensions and reveals the complex internal dynamics of deciding to create a post-colonial knowledge society. It touches upon the international dynamics that enabled India to seek help from across the Cold War ideological divide and the link between IIT alumni who migrated and India's Information Technology industry.
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Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2020
Subramanian’s The Caste of Merit addresses the issue of educational inequality in colonial and independent India, focusing on the Indian Institutes of Technology (iits) that have trained the engineering elites since the 1950s. The members of the high caste who initially comprised this group ascribed their personal success to merit, not to background. India’s policy of allowing disadvantaged caste groups to enter the (iits), however, challenged the high castes’ representation of their educational privilege as simply a matter of talent. Subramanian’s view of the upper-caste position as an attempt to forestall progress toward a more egalitarian Indian society opens a methodological debate about the fundamental epistemic demands that scholars must satisfy before they adopt social causes above and beyond the conveying of objective information.
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This paper, based on policy documents of the Indian government and the UNESCO archives in Paris, tries to sketch the underlying dynamics of the decision to invest in a technologically intensive mode of modernisation in India in the 1950s by briefly focusing on the politics behind the setting up of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), specifically, IIT Kharagpur (1950, IIT status in 1951). This process had both national and international dimensions and reveals the complex internal dynamics of deciding to create a post-colonial knowledge society. It touches upon the international dynamics that enabled India to seek help from across the Cold War ideological divide and the link between IIT alumni who migrated and India's Information Technology industry.
IITs and the Project of Indian Democracy
Economic and Political Weekly, 2016
Technological education in India has privileged the demands of the market and industry, while ignoring the demands of democracy to create an egalitarian society. The engineer is trained to "make" and "innovate" for a growing economy without understanding the social processes that produce certain "demands" in the fi rst place, or considering how goods manufactured are to be distributed fairly in an unequal society. To make a successful journey from passive suppliers of technology to thought leaders on the question of India's development, the Indian Institutes of Technology must respond to the dominant discourse on development and articulate paradigmatic ideas on what development ought to be for India's democratic project.
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It is about the Modi's government particularly the HRD Ministry along with the IIT-Madras that exercised its power to ban a study circle that discussed critically about the government and its policies and programs. This essay rips opens the caste politics that looms in the institutions of governance and high levels of learning.
Sociological Bulletin, 2022
The higher education system in India is creating newer structures of hierarchy and differentiation to become distinct. This is largely due to the rising demand for professional education, the returns of which are perceived to be higher than a general degree. Middle-class families have always operated within distinctive structural frameworks to contest for social cachet through education. In India, one such arena is the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). To determine who is meritorious enough to secure an IIT seat, the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) has become the arbiter where merit is the relative rank of contestants and shadow education a key training site to ace the JEE. This article is based on a sociological analysis of family credentialing strategies around shadow education that prepares aspirants for the IIT-JEE. Drawing on an analysis of the middle class in Delhi, I discuss how these strategies are feeding fodder to the aspirants’ dream of pursuing an IIT degree and exacerbati...