Why UGC's New Equity Rules Finally Have Teeth

'What has changed is that the new regulations are backed by a clear enforcement framework. They have real consequences and, for the first time, make compliance unavoidable.'

When 26-year-old Dr Payal Tadvi, a gynaecology student from the Tadvi Bhil community, an Adivasi Muslim group -- died by suicide in May 2019 after reportedly enduring relentless caste-based harassment from senior colleagues at Mumbai's Topiwala National Medical College and B Y L Nair Hospital, her mother Abeda Tadvi knew the fight was far from over.

She approached Advocate Disha Wadekar, who was already representing Radhika Vemula -- mother of Rohit Vemula, the Dalit PhD scholar who had taken his life three years earlier under similar circumstances at the Hyderabad Central University.

Together, they filed a petition in the Supreme Court that has culminated in the University Grants Commission's 2026 regulations on equity in higher education. Wadekar, who practises at the Supreme Court and co-founded Community for the Eradication of Discrimination in Education and Employment to address minority representation in India's legal profession, has spent years navigating the intersection of anti-discrimination law and systemic institutional apathy.

In this interview with Prasanna D Zore/Rediff, she discusses what makes the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026 different, why the backlash from upper caste critics misses the point entirely, and how provisions borrowed from American university campuses might finally create safer spaces for marginalised students in India.

In the first part of this interview, Wadekar explains what changed -- and what remains troublingly unchanged.

'2012 UGC equity regulations lacked an inbuilt enforcement mechanism'

You were instrumental in challenging the 'toothless' 2012 guidelines. What specific legal teeth in the 2026 regulations do you believe will finally prevent the kind of institutional apathy seen in the Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi cases?

I would not frame it as a challenge to the 2012 regulations themselves. When Payal Tadvi died (by suicide), we approached the Supreme Court on behalf of Payal's mother, Abeda Tadvi, and Rohith Vemula's mother, Radhika Vemula. Our intervention was driven by two core concerns.

First -- and most critically -- the 2012 equity regulations already existed, but they were largely invisible in practice. There was neither meaningful implementation nor institutional awareness of these obligations.

To substantiate this, we conducted extensive fact-finding through RTIs filed in 2018 and 2019. What emerged was deeply troubling: Almost all colleges and universities had not constituted the Equal Opportunity Cells that the 2012 regulations had expressly mandated.

Our case before the Court was therefore not about the absence of norms, but about systemic non-compliance and administrative apathy.

The tragedy in both the Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi cases lay in the fact that protective frameworks were formally in place, yet functionally absent. That implementation gap was at the heart of our legal challenge.

Weren't the 2012 guidelines only advisory in nature?

No -- these were not advisory guidelines. They were regulations, and regulations are mandatory. The problem was not their legal status but the fact that they were being flouted with complete impunity.

In our experience, and as our data showed, there was widespread non-awareness and near-total non-implementation across universities.

More importantly, the 2012 UGC equity regulations lacked an inbuilt enforcement mechanism. While the UGC consistently described them as mandatory and directed institutions to comply, the regulations themselves did not contain a non-compliance clause. This meant there were no automatic consequences for violation.

The UGC, as a statutory regulator, already has significant powers -- such as withdrawing grants, suspending affiliations, or derecognising courses -- but these powers were not expressly embedded within the 2012 regulations as enforceable sanctions.

One of our primary demands before the Court was therefore the introduction of a clear enforcement framework -- what we described as a non-compliance clause -- so that violations would attract tangible institutional consequences. Our concern was fundamentally about implementation and accountability.

Our second set of concerns related to substantive gaps in the 2012 regulations. While they were progressive for their time, the regulatory landscape had evolved significantly after 2012.

Subsequent frameworks -- such as the anti-ragging regulations and the sexual harassment regulations -- had developed far more robust models for committee composition, appellate oversight, and monitoring mechanisms.

In comparison, the equity regulations lagged behind on these crucial aspects. We placed these lacunae before the Court and proposed amendments to bring the framework in line with contemporary standards of campus accountability.

What is the reason educational institutions ignored the 2012 regulations and what has changed now?

It may be because the 2012 regulations have largely existed on paper. There was no real enforcement, no consequences for non-compliance, and therefore no perceived threat. Institutions could ignore them with impunity, and many did.

What has changed now is that the new regulations are backed by a clear enforcement framework. They have real consequences and, for the first time, make compliance unavoidable.

'We have seen OBC students too die by suicide in these institutions'

One of the most significant changes in these regulations is the explicit inclusion of other backward classes under the definition of caste-based discrimination.
How does this change the legal landscape for a group that was previously often left out of campus equity frameworks?

This inclusion is significant, and in fact it was one of the core suggestions we had made while engaging with the shortcomings of the 2012 regulations.

The evidence -- much of it drawn from the UGC's own data -- shows that caste-based discrimination in higher education is not limited to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. It increasingly affects OBC students as well.

Over the last decade, particularly in the post-Mandal period, OBC students have entered elite institutions such as IITs, IIMs, and central universities in larger numbers. This increased presence has also intensified hostile discourses around 'merit' and reservations, which often translate into everyday harassment and exclusion.

We have seen OBC students too die by suicide in these institutions. Yet, until now, campus equity frameworks largely failed to recognise their vulnerability.

What the 2026 regulations do is acknowledge that caste-based discrimination operates far more through indirect and systemic mechanisms than through overt acts alone.

While explicit abuse -- such as caste slurs -- does occur, the overwhelming majority of cases involve subtle, institutionalised forms of discrimination: Biased evaluation, social exclusion, labelling, differential mentoring, and cumulative academic disadvantage.

These are precisely the forms of discrimination that OBC students routinely encounter but which remained legally invisible under earlier frameworks. Their express inclusion therefore materially alters the legal landscape by bringing these experiences within the ambit of regulatory protection.

Equally important is the broader reconceptualisation of who can seek protection under the regulations. The 2012 framework was narrowly student-centric; it defined discrimination almost exclusively in relation to students and academic processes like admissions and evaluation. Teachers and non-teaching staff were entirely outside its scope.

This exclusion was particularly troubling given that non-teaching staff -- especially Class D workers -- are overwhelmingly drawn from Dalit and Adivasi communities and face entrenched forms of caste-based humiliation and exclusion on campuses.

The new regulations respond to this gap by adopting a wider definition of the 'aggrieved person'. By not restricting complainants to students alone, they allow any person within a higher educational institution -- students, faculty, or staff -- to invoke the framework.

This shift recognises that caste operates across the entire institutional ecosystem of higher education, not just within classrooms, and marks a meaningful step towards a more comprehensive and realistic equality regime.

'I reject the claim this is heavy-handed against upper castes'

Critics from the general category argue that by defining caste-based discrimination specifically as acts against SCs, STs and OBC members, the law creates a hierarchy of protection.
How do you respond to the concern that a student from a general background has no equivalent recourse under these specific regulations if they face bias?

Across democratic societies, equality law consistently recognises that discrimination flows from positions of structural dominance to vulnerability -- not the other way around. Just as laws addressing racial discrimination are not meant to protect White people from Black people, or gender justice laws are not framed to protect men from women, caste-based protections are necessarily targeted at those who have historically borne the burden of exclusion.

Secondly, it is important to understand the limited and specific scope of these regulations. They are not a comprehensive framework to address every form of distress, harassment, or suicide on campus.

Their stated objective is to address discrimination faced by marginalised identities -- on grounds of caste, gender, religion, disability, and related axes of disadvantage -- and to create a more equitable institutional environment for those groups.

This does not deny that students from general or uppercaste backgrounds may experience stress, mental health challenges, or even harassment. They may, and there are other legal and regulatory mechanisms -- ranging from criminal law to service and grievance redress frameworks -- through which such issues can be addressed.

But the purpose of these regulations is not to equalise all experiences of suffering; it is to confront a specific form of structural discrimination that has been historically documented, legally recognised, and empirically substantiated.

Seen in that light, the regulations do not create a hierarchy of protection -- they reflect a hierarchy of disadvantage. That distinction is central to the logic of substantive equality, which the Indian constitutional framework itself endorses.

A major point of contention for many faculty and students is the lack of a clause to penalise malafide or false complaints. In your view, why is it necessary to exclude such a deterrent?
How do we protect the innocent from potential misuse of the law? This has been raised particularly around the Atrocities Act as well.

From a legal perspective, the possibility of misuse is not exceptional; it is inherent in every law. Even the most basic IPC offences, such as theft, are routinely misused, often against the poorest and most vulnerable. Yet we do not respond by dismantling criminal law altogether.

The correct question is not whether misuse is possible -- it always is -- but whether the law addresses a real and documented harm that warrants protection.

In the case of caste-based discrimination in higher education, that answer is unequivocally yes. Including a specific deterrent clause against so-called 'false' complaints within protective regulations often has a chilling effect.

It disproportionately discourages victims from coming forward, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds who already face institutional power imbalances, fear retaliation, and lack social capital.

The experience across legal regimes shows that such clauses end up weakening enforcement rather than preventing abuse.

As for protecting the innocent, existing legal safeguards already provide ample remedies. Individuals against whom false or malicious allegations are made are not without recourse. Civil remedies such as defamation, criminal provisions against false evidence, and institutional grievance mechanisms remain fully available. The legal system does not leave anyone remediless.

The law's purpose is not to eliminate all risk of misuse -- a standard no law can meet -- but to ensure that genuine grievances are not silenced before they are even heard.

But don't you feel these regulations are heavy-handed against the general category, upper caste, whatever you want to call them? Because the fear among the upper caste students is they will willy-nilly have to face the wrong end of the stick.

I do not quite accept the framing of this as something that is 'heavy-handed' against upper-caste or general-category students. To begin with, these regulations are not limited to caste at all. They address discrimination on multiple grounds -- caste, gender, religion, and disability. Yet the anxiety seems to surface almost exclusively around caste, while the other axes of protection are largely ignored. That selective focus itself needs to be interrogated.

If the concern is that protections might be misused, then the same fear should logically apply across all these categories.

Men could make similar claims about gender-based protections; religious majorities could raise concerns about minority safeguards; able-bodied persons could argue that disability protections might be misused. But we do not see that level of panic across these domains.

The disproportionate reaction to caste-based protections tells us something important about how deeply caste hierarchies continue to structure institutional life.

More fundamentally, these regulations are neither novel nor radical. Comparable frameworks have existed for decades in universities across the United States, the United Kingdom, and other jurisdictions, through Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices.

These offices serve two core functions: First, they provide a formal mechanism for addressing discrimination on grounds such as race, gender, disability, and sexuality; second, they undertake sensitisation, training, and institutional reform to prevent discrimination in the first place.

It is worth noting that many Indian students -- including those from upper caste backgrounds -- benefit from these DEI structures when they study or work abroad. They approach these offices as racial minorities, seek support, and participate in affirmative action and inclusion initiatives without perceiving them as 'heavy-handed.'

The idea that equity mechanisms are oppressive emerges selectively when similar frameworks are proposed within Indian institutions.

In that sense, India is not over-regulating -- it is lagging behind. The trajectory here has been slow and hard-won: From the Thorat Committee's findings in 2008 after reports of caste discrimination at AIIMS, to the 2012 UGC regulations, and finally to the present framework, shaped through sustained advocacy and judicial intervention by families like those of Abeda Tadvi and Radhika Vemula.

These regulations did not emerge overnight; they are the product of nearly two decades of documented exclusion and institutional failure.