A quota is only ever as strong as the discretion left to the people administering it. This is the unglamorous truth behind every guarantee of proportional inclusion, from boardroom targets to electoral reservations: the rule can mandate that a seat be set aside, but someone still has to decide who fills it, and wherever that someone retains a judgment call, the judgment call becomes the place the rule goes to be quietly undone. India’s universities offer an unusually clean demonstration, because the discretion there has a name, and the name appears in the official record.
The country reserves a fixed proportion of public university faculty positions for candidates from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes: the constitutional categories covering Dalits, the communities once branded “untouchable” at the base of South Asia’s caste hierarchy, and Adivasis, India’s indigenous peoples. On paper the guarantee is firm. In practice the posts sit empty at a scale that a genuine shortage of qualified people cannot explain. As of 2021, more than 2,389 posts reserved for Scheduled Castes and 1,199 for Scheduled Tribes lay vacant across 45 central universities; a University Grants Commission review in 2023 found roughly 30 per cent of reserved posts unfilled, the gap widening at the senior professor and associate-professor levels where power and permanence concentrate. This year’s recruitment notices carry the residue plainly: universities from Utkal to others advertise “backlog” vacancies (posts reserved years ago, never filled, carried forward) as though the failure were a clerical matter of catching up rather than a pattern repeating itself.
The mechanism that produces the emptiness is the selection committee, and the instrument is the phrase “not found suitable.” When a committee interviews reserved-category candidates and declares none of them adequate, the post is not filled by a general-category candidate; it is carried forward as a backlog vacancy, to be advertised again, and, often enough, declared unfilled again. A 2022 study by the Ambedkar University Faculty Association found that around 60 per cent of reserved-post vacancies resulted not from an absence of applicants but from these discretionary rejections. A parliamentary committee reviewing the practice was blunter than academic bodies usually permit themselves to be: it declined to accept the recurring claim that no suitable candidates could be found, concluding instead that qualified Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates were
“deliberately declared as ‘not suitable’ because of wrong biased assessment by the Selection Committee.”
The pattern has a face: in 2025, Delhi University’s selection committee declared physicist Ashok Kumar, a Dalit scientist whose research record (an h-index of 120, and a share in CERN’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics that same year) sits well above the median for an Indian professor, “Not Found Suitable” for a promotion that went to two of his junior colleagues instead. Ashok Bharti, who heads the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations, has pointed to cases like Kumar’s to argue publicly that the finding functions less as an assessment of merit than as a mechanism for keeping outcomes constant regardless of who applies.
The obvious reading is that the committees are staffed by prejudiced individuals making prejudiced calls, and that the fix is to find better people. That reading is not wrong, but it stops short of the more useful diagnosis. The point is not that some professors are casteist (some are, some are not) but that the system is built to let their judgment operate without friction and without record. “Suitability” is an unspecified standard; who sits on a selection committee is itself unregulated for social composition; and a rejection requires no justification that could later be tested. Caste, in such a structure, does not need to announce itself. It lives in the remainder the rule left unspecified: in the gap between “the post is reserved” and “the person is acceptable,” a gap wide enough to drive a career through. This is why the parliamentary committee’s actual recommendation was not exhortation but design: a mandatory Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe member on every faculty selection committee, an attempt to alter who holds the discretion rather than to appeal to how they use it.
For a global reader, the shape of this should be recognisable under other names. It is the same logic by which “cultural fit” can quietly filter a hiring pool, by which a “merit” that is never operationalised can reproduce the demographics of the people already in the room. The mechanism is universal; what India adds is a formal quota sitting directly on top of it, which makes the sabotage legible in a way it usually is not. Most systems can claim their exclusions are invisible accidents of an open process. Here the state has already conceded, by reserving the post, that the person should exist: so when the post stays empty, the emptiness is an argument, and everyone can read it.
There is a counter-motion owed, and it deserves its full weight rather than a dismissal. Selection committees do sometimes face thin fields, particularly in specialised or quantitative disciplines where the pipeline of doctoral candidates from these communities has been throttled for generations upstream, by the same under-representation, one rung earlier. A committee that lowered every standard to fill a post could also do a disservice, and the demand for reserved-category faculty is partly a demand to fix the pipeline, not only the interview. But this concession, taken seriously, indicts the system further rather than exonerating it. If the pipeline is thin, that is the cumulative product of the same exclusion operating at every prior stage; and a 60 per cent discretionary-rejection rate is not the signature of committees straining to find qualified people they cannot locate. It is the signature of a gate, working.
The test of whether any of this is changing is therefore specific and countable. Not another circular affirming that reservation is policy: that has never been in doubt. The measurable questions are two: whether the backlog number falls, year on year, rather than being perpetually “cleared” only to reaccumulate; and whether the “not found suitable” rate drops once selection committees are made to include the people the posts are meant for and to record reasons that can be reviewed. If reserved posts continue to be advertised, interviewed, and returned empty at the same rate after the composition of the committees changes, the shortage was never of candidates. It was of will.
The deeper forces will outlast any single recruitment cycle. The supply of qualified Dalit and Adivasi scholars is rising, slowly, as each generation forces the door a little wider; the institutions holding the door remain composed largely of those already inside; and “suitability,” as an unexaminable standard, is far too convenient to be surrendered without pressure. A chair reserved for the excluded, left empty on the finding that no excluded person was good enough, is not a neutral outcome. It is a decision, taken quietly, many times a year. Who sits on the committee that makes it, and whether they can now be made to write their reasons down, is very nearly the whole of the question.
