In mid July, Khushboo Chaudhary left her home in Rajasthan to join the MBBS programme at AIIMS, India’s premier medical school. She was among the 195,000 applicants to the undergraduate medical programme this year, and one of just 72 Indian students finally admitted to the institute’s south Delhi campus. As a member of the Other Backward Classes, she occupied one of the 35 seats reserved in the incoming class for students from underprivileged castes and tribes—colloquially, “category students.”
Chaudhary, with her entire class, went through a nine-day orientation programme in early August. Among the things she was introduced to was AIIMS’s mentorship programme, established in 2012 after the suicide of a Dalit medical student left the institute reeling under allegations of caste-based discrimination and inadequate support for students. Currently, each incoming MBBS student is paired with one of 37 faculty mentors, who are to help their mentees negotiate the stresses of academic life. With category students, the mentors are also meant to help them with the difficulties they face in particular. These range from the academic—for example, problems with English for students from Hindi-medium schools—to the social. In 2007, an official committee investigating the treatment of Dalits and adivasis at the institute found that most of the category students it interviewed reported caste-based discrimination. Still today, category students at AIIMS often complain of unfair treatment by the faculty and administration, and of ostracisation by other students.
Near 3 am on 30 August, Chaudhary was discovered dead. She had locked herself inside her on-campus hostel room, and hanged herself. This was, since 2010, the fourth reported case of suicide by a student from a disadvantaged caste at the institute. Though no suicide note was found and the causes of the suicide remain unclear, her death raised, once again, critical questions about AIIMS’s mechanisms of student support, including its mentorship programme. Many who know the institute well, I discovered over a month of conversations, remain unconvinced of its effect, particularly for category students—a discouraging sign in light of AIIMS’s position as a role model for India’s entire industry of higher education.
Two and a half weeks before Chaudhary’s death, on 12 August, I sat in on a seminar for MBBS faculty on mentoring students. The seminar, spread over two days, brought together about 20 AIIMS professors and expert guests. At one session, a visiting sociologist spoke of the need to sensitise faculty members to the varied backgrounds of their students. She described AIIMS as “a microcosm that is fraught with marginalities,” and said the institute “has students that come from regions that are differentially evaluated by us.”
The seminar and the student orientation have been held every year since 2012 by the Centre for Research and Education for Social Transformation, or CREST—an autonomous institution under the government of Kerala, with over a decade of experience in helping students from Dalit, adivasi and other marginalised groups perform better in various academic institutions. CREST’s concept document for the seminar acknowledged that, at AIIMS, “for students from the disadvantaged backgrounds … performance level, in certain cases at least, is much below the desired level.” A “brief assessment,” the document said, had shown that category students “undergo serious stress at AIIMS due to academic as well as social reasons.”
“It’s not easy for someone unexposed to the sociology of exclusion to understand how exclusion works,” Nirmal Joy, a course coordinator with CREST, told me. “Usually, it takes about six months for people to get to know each other in institutions like AIIMS,” he explained. “During this, students who are less interactive or belong to less privileged backgrounds are likely to get left behind. … CREST accelerates the process of student solidarity by accelerating the process of making friends.”
Nearly all the category students I spoke to pointed out the academic difficulties underprivileged newcomers face. One Dalit student, for instance, told me he couldn’t take math in class 12 “because there was no math teacher in my school,” and that he had never studied in English before AIIMS. On this front, some students told me, mentors can be useful—for instance, by guiding them towards additional English lessons.
But past that, the effects of AIIMS’s revamped approach are less emphatic. One faculty member, who asked not to be named (as did all the students and faculty I spoke to), said that “the AIIMS mentoring system has gradually been failing over the past decade … in spite of the fact that AIIMS has reacted to past incidents by visibly laying greater emphasis on mentorship.” It is entirely up to students to bring up concerns and difficulties with their mentors, but “ones who find it difficult to ask for help” do not. “We cannot wait for them to reach out to us,” he added. “We need to make the first move.” But, since faculty members are very busy, “certain faculty do not devote a desired amount of time to their mentees.” In the faculty member’s view, “Mentoring is something that many don’t prioritise, because it doesn’t count for promotion, we can’t write a paper out of it.”
One category student, who is in the second year of the MBBS programme and participated in student orientation last year, told me he “can vouch for the fact that CREST doesn’t discuss caste.” That view was echoed by several of his peers—surprisingly, given the organisation’s emphasis on caste-related issues in its own documentation, and the fact that it was invited to the institute in response to a Dalit student’s suicide. Another category student, who started his MBBS last year, told me he had not experienced caste-based discrimination at AIIMS. But those with longer experience with the institute told me it did exist.
A senior faculty member said the institute has long been beleaguered by casteism and classism. After the early 1990s and the nation-wide protests against the recommendations of the Mandal Commission—a government-appointed body that identified “socially or educationally backward” groups, and advocated reserving positions for them in government and educational institutions—students from the middle classes and relatively less disadvantaged castes “aligned with the privileged students,” he said. A stigma was attached “to those from less privileged caste and class backgrounds,” he added.
Another faculty member, who has been working at AIIMS since the 1990s, told me in his office that “the undercurrent of feeling in the AIIMS administration was always anti-reservation.” In 2006, he said, as students across the country demonstrated against proposals to increase the number of reserved seats in government universities, “the feeling was that the students were supported by the AIIMS administration.” The doors of many Dalit and adivasi students “were painted with signs asking them to leave the institute,” and they “gradually began sticking to Hostel 4 and 5, where they would find rooms. A kind of ghettoisation took place.” That trend has since waned, and today the only clear segregation between AIIMS hostels is by gender.
In a small room at a boys’ hostel, I spoke to two Dalit postgraduate students, alumni of the MBBS programme. In his experience of the institution’s culture, one of them told me, and having been part of an informal system of mentoring prior to 2012, the new mentorship programme alone “is too small an intervention to make any kind of change” to the prevailing mindset.
His companion told me that younger students who don’t see caste as an issue at AIIMS might not have the full picture. “Many people’s social structures prevent them from talking and telling each other about caste,” he said. “This does not mean the situation doesn’t exist. Compared to other medical institutions, AIIMS is still a good institute, and often it’s the pride of being an AIIMS-onian that comes first. But let’s be very clear, the first impression is not the last impression.”
Until the institute takes a stronger stance on addressing complaints of casteism, the first postgraduate said, the mentorship programme will remain like an elephant’s tusks, of purely ornamental value—“haathi ke daant, dikhane ke liye.”