AN EMERGING GRAMMAR OF CASTE

THE phrase “Not found suitable” sounds harmless enough. It carries no overt malice, no visible prejudice, just the dry neutrality of bureaucratic language. In fact, it is precisely the kind of phrase that passes unquestioned.

- JOHN J KENNEDY

And yet, in university recruitment rooms across India, it may be doing something deeply consequential: quietly keeping certain groups out.

To be clear, this concern is not speculative. Over the past few years, multiple media reports drawing on findings from the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education (2023-24) have pointed to a troubling pattern. Despite meeting eligibility criteria, candidates from Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities are increasingly being filtered out under the vague label of “Not found suitable”. At the same time, the committee noted that thousands of reserved faculty positions in central universities remained vacant, with estimates indicating that over 60 percent of SC and more than 80 percent of ST professor-level posts unfilled. Seen together, these are not isolated gaps; they point to a structural problem.

If one looks more closely at faculty composition, the imbalance becomes even harder to ignore. Data from the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2021-22 and submissions to the University Grants Commission show that central universities continue to be overwhelmingly dominated by general category candidates. SC and ST representation, especially at senior levels, remains in the low single-digit shares, far below the constitutionally mandated 15 percent and 7.5 percent.