My elder son scored 93 percent in the CBSE Class X exam this year. My younger son is not far behind. By every measure that this country taught us—to believe in marks, ranks, merit—they have arrived. The admission letters are on the table. The neighbours have begun to call. And I cannot sleep.
I read those letters with a knot in my chest. I do not fear the exams. I fear the college, the classroom, the hostel corridor. I fear the teacher who will ask my son's rank only to work out his caste. I fear the roommate who will stop sharing a water bottle the moment he does the math. I fear the ceiling fan.
I know how that last sentence sounds. I wish it were a metaphor.
Broken Men
Dr BR Ambedkar called us the Broken Men. In The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables? (1948), he traced our ancestry to the scattered remnants of defeated tribes, pushed to the outskirts of settled villages, fed scraps, handed the work no one else would do, and declared 'untouchable' when they refused to give up beef for the newly sacred cow. We were the leftovers of history.
Seventy-seven years after he drafted the Constitution, we are still broken. The labels have changed—Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, OBC, the "historically disadvantaged." But, the fracture has not healed. It has only been rebranded. We are 30 crore people, a quarter of this republic, counted in when the census needs to swell the Hindu total, and beaten after.
The National Crime Records Bureau's Crime in India 2022 logged 57,582 cases against Scheduled Castes and 10,064 against Scheduled Tribes, a 13.1 percent rise in anti-Dalit crime in a single year.
That is the macro.
This Is What It Looks Like Inside a Hostel Room
Rohith Vemula, a PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad. The university had stopped his monthly stipend six months earlier, suspended him with four other Ambedkar Students' Association members, and barred him from the hostel. He was found dead on 17 January 2016. He was only 26.
Payal Tadvi, a second-year postgraduate resident in gynaecology at BYL Nair Hospital, Mumbai, from the Tadvi Bhil Adivasi community, the first woman in her community to pursue a postgraduate medical degree. Her three senior doctors mocked her NEET score, taunted her caste, and kept her out of the operating theatre. On 22 May 2019, she was found dead. She was just 26.
Darshan Solanki, a first-year chemical engineering student at IIT Bombay, had just spent three and a half months on campus. According to testimony later recorded by the institute's own SC/ST cell, his roommate "reduced interaction" the moment he learned Darshan's JEE rank. On 12 February 2023, he was found dead. He was only 18.
The list does not stop here.
Now,Nithin Raj, a 19-year-old first-year BDS student at Kannur Dental College in Anjarakandy, Kannur (Kerala). He was from Uzhamalakkal, a village outside Thiruvananthapuram. On 10 April 2026, he was found on the stones between the administrative block and the hospital, fallen from a height. He was rushed to the medical college, but was declared brought dead. He had called home the day before. He was planning to visit the next morning.
In the audio clips he sent his friends in the days before his death—clips now with the police—he describes being called “rotten dog“ by his teachers, his mother being mocked, and being told he had no right to study at the institute.
Two faculty members, Dr MK Ram and Dr Sangeetha Nambiar, have been booked under the Prevention of Atrocities Act. Both were absconding at the time of writing. Dr Ram was later dismissed. The college has issued a statement denying caste discrimination and attributing the death to a loan-app dispute.
His sister's reply was short: "Nithin would not have ended his life over such a small amount. He survived worse."
This is Kerala. The state that exports its literacy rate to the world. The state we are told is 'different'.
This Is the Pattern We Live With
In December 2021, the Education Ministry told Parliament that between 2014 and 2021, 122 students had died by suicide on the campuses of the IITs, NITs, IIMs, and central universities. Sixty-eight of them—24 SC, 3 ST, 41 OBC—were from historically disadvantaged communities.
In 2023, India lost 10,786 farmers to suicide. In the same year, student suicides reached a record 13,892, the highest in a decade, and an 8.1 percent share of all suicides in the country.
Student suicides in India now exceed farmer suicides. Every time I read that sentence, I think of my son's admission letter.
You will tell me there are safeguards. But the UGC's 2012 equity regulations were advisory, and they were ignored.
In 2019, Radhika Vemula and Abeda Salim Tadvi, Rohith's mother and Payal's mother, respectivel, represented by Indira Jaising, filed a writ in the Supreme Court demanding enforcement.
It took six years for the court to force the UGC to rewrite its rules.
A System That Delays Justice
On 15 January 2026, two days before the tenth anniversary of Rohith's death, a bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and R Mahadevan delivered nine directions on student suicide in Amit Kumar v Union of India, the case arising from the deaths of Ayush Ashna and Anil Kumar. The order did not once use the words "caste" or "Scheduled Castes."
Two days earlier, on 13 January, the UGC had finally notified the Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, 2026, binding rules, the Equal Opportunity Centre, Equity Squads, mandatory sensitisation, the whole scaffolding the mothers had asked for.
On 29 January, sixteen days later, the Supreme Court stayed those very regulations, describing them as "vague" and "capable of misuse." The 2012 framework, which was in force when Rohith and Payal died, was revived in the meantime. The petition is pending. The rules are frozen. The complaints keep arriving.
This is how the machinery works. Not by denying us our rights, by administering them into paralysis. So tell me, as a father, what I am meant to do. Ambedkar told us: Educate, Agitate, Organise. The country has decided we will do none of the three.
The State Is Stepping Back
Education's share of the Union Budget has fallen from 4.14 percent in 2014-15 to 2.5 percent in 2024-25, a 40 percent collapse in the share of national spending dedicated to educating this country's children.
In Budget 2023, the pre-matric scholarship for OBC, EBC, and Denotified Tribe students was slashed by 41 percent. The same Budget reduced the National Fellowship for SC students from Rs 173 crore to Rs 163 crore.
Then came Budget 2025. The National Fellowship and Scholarship for Higher Education of Scheduled Tribe students, the scheme that puts tribal scholars through their PhDs, was cut by 99.9 percent. From Rs 165 crore in the previous year (revised up to Rs 250 crore), it was reduced to Rs 0.02 crore. Two lakh rupees. For the entire country.
The National Overseas Scholarship for ST students was cut by 99.8 per cent in the same Budget.
A government that finds lakhs of crores for corporate tax cuts and temple corridors decided that the fellowship meant to put a tribal student through a PhD would survive on Rs 2 lakh. That is not a budget number. It is a message.
Progressive on Paper
Kerala delivers the same message in softer handwriting. The Comptroller and Auditor General's Report No 3 of 2024 paints a damning picture of how Kerala administers scholarships for its most marginalised students.
Behind the state's progressive reputation lies a welfare architecture riddled with delays, data gaps, and diversion.
In the Post-Matric Scholarship for Scheduled Caste students, the audit found no survey to identify potential beneficiaries, producing wide gaps between estimated and actual numbers. The state lost Rs 96.65 lakh between 2017 and 2022 by failing to claim administrative expenses from the Centre. Divyang SC students were denied the mandatory 10 percent top-up.
Scholarship applications for 1,246 students were never processed. Payments were delayed by up to five years, this in a system called e-grantz, designed specifically to prevent delay. Eligible students at institutions of national importance went unpaid. Instances of multiple payments to the same student were also recorded.
The Pre-Matric ST scheme fared no better. Between 2017 and 2021, four to 20 percent of Scheduled Tribe students did not receive their scholarships. The department failed to publicise the scheme, obtain audit certificates for Centrally sponsored components, or conduct any social audit.
In the Post-Matric ST scheme, disbursement delays stretched from one to four years. A software failure allowed students to be paid accommodation charges for both hostel and private lodging simultaneously.
Both my sons were eligible. Neither received a single rupee. When we asked the school, we were told there must be "technical glitches in the government system.
Included in Theory, Excluded in Practice
In the department-wise audit of Kerala's own budget utilisation for 2021-22, SC Welfare spent just 47.73 percent of its allocation; ST Welfare spent 37.48 percent.
This is what governments, left, right and centre, agree on: our children must be kept educable in theory, unaffordable in fact. And then, if the scholarship somehow arrives, if the child somehow gets in, there is the campus.
On 25 November 1949, the day before the Constitution was adopted, Ambedkar warned the Constituent Assembly: "On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality… We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment."
Seventy-seven years later, the contradiction has not been resolved. It has only been administered. By a Republic that prints Ambedkar on every government wall while staying his daughters' petitions, cutting his fellowships by three nines, and revising the data downwards when the bodies pile up.
My sons have the ranks. In a Republic that meant what it said, that would be the end of the story. In this Republic, it is only where my fear begins.
I will send them anyway. Not sending them is the older defeat, the one Ambedkar spent his life arguing us out of.
But do not mistake my sending them for consent. Do not mistake a Dalit father's courage for a Dalit father's trust. We are still the Broken Men. Our children are walking into buildings built on a fault line this nation refuses to name. And every admission letter in my house, for now, is also a prayer.
(Rejimon Kuttappan is an independent journalist from Kerala. He is a workers’ rights researcher, forced labour investigator, and author of 'Undocumented'. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses, nor is responsible for the same.)