Demand for Full Inquiry and Justice in the matter related to Injustice to the three Deserving Dalit Students of the Preparatory Course (2002-2003) at IIT Bombay

January 28, 2004.

Sub: Demand for Full Inquiry and Justice in the matter related to Injustice to the three Deserving Dalit Students of the Preparatory Course (2002-2003) at IIT Bombay.

Hon. President,

The IIT Bombay (IITB) authorities have done a great injustice to the Dalit students of the Preparatory Course (2002-2003) by not following the prescribed syllabus specially developed for this course and teaching the B. Tech. 1st year syllabus for the Physics and Mathematics courses. As a result of this, 3 deserving Dalit students have been victimized and expelled from IITB as the authorities state that they could not perform in one or two courses out of 8 theory courses and 4 laboratory courses. The unsatisfactory performance was essentially due the violation of the syllabus and several other lapses on the part of the IITB authorities. A detailed account of this is given on the website http://dum.150m.com. An appeal was made by the Dalit Utkarsha Manch on August 12, 2003 to the MHRD. IIT Bombay authorities, in their reply on this appeal, deliberately avoided to give their comments/answers on several important issues including that of not following the prescribed syllabus. Thus by giving round about and vague answers, they created an illusion on the MHRD officials that no injustice has been done.

Preparatory course has been introduced to improve the intake of Dalit students into the IITs on the advice of the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development. The students who qualify in the All India Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) are admitted to this preparatory course. In this Programme, the students are required to undergo intensive training in English, Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics for two semesters at such a level as to make it possible for the students to join the regular B. Tech. Course at the 1st year level. This course is designed as a bridge between 12th std. and first year B. Tech. Programme and essentially to stress on the fundamentals. However, by taking such casual approach of ignoring the well structured Preparatory Course Syllabus and teaching the syllabus of the 1st year B. Tech. level for the students of this special course, the purpose and the spirit of the course has been totally violated by the authorities and also resulted in victimization of the three deserving students.

Very harsh rules (in contrast to the liberal and students friendly rules for the B. Tech. and other programmes) have been made for this Preparatory Course with an objective of elimination of some of the students and thus making these students loose one full year of their career. Such attitude has resulted in discouraging the students to join this programme as evident from the statistics of admissions in IITs for this Course. Moreover some of the students from this course are simply expelled from the Institute after just one re-examination under the pretext of upholding the Merit. (As per the rules, now made available to this Manch, there is no provision for expulsion.) This is a clear example of biased attitude to the Preparatory Course. This has very serious implications on the spirit and purpose of the Preparatory Course and such bad practices can not be allowed to continue.

Since this case of injustice is being suppressed by the authorities of IITB as well as the MHRD officials, we request your action by

1. providing justice to the three victimized Dalit students by admitting them to 1st year B.Tech Programme at IIT Bombay,
2. by taking disciplinary action against the defaulting authorities.
3. implementation of the Preparatory Course in the right spirit for the welfare of the Dalit students and thus stopping the wrong practice of elimination of some students from this course after one full year and
4. a better substitute programme in place of the present one full year Preparatory Course.