Only 5% of students enrolled in the top 30 private universities in India are from Scheduled Castes (SC), according to a Parliamentary Standing Committee report on Education, Women, Children, Youth. and Sports. Tabled in the Lok Sabha on March 26, the report notably said that the Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani, had zero students from the SC, Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC) categories.
The data is from the yet-to-be-published All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) for 2022-23, included in the Parliamentary Committee’s 364th report on Demands for Grants 2025-26 of the Department of Higher Education.
It shows social category-wise enrolment and faculty figures in the private universities that found a place among the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF)’s top 100 overall university rankings.
Less than 1% of students in these universities are from ST, while 24% are from OBC.
Overall, only 4% of the faculty in the 30 private universities are from SCs.
However, the Parliamentary Committee highlighted that the AISHE data is still “somewhat unreliable” given discrepancies such as showing that Anna University has only one faculty member. The Committee recommended that AISHE collect data at the individual level rather than institutional level for better quality.
While the report shows data from 34 universities, four of them — Jadavpur University, Anna University, Panjab University, and National Institute of Technology, Silchar — are public universities.
Manipal Academy of Higher Education had 0.46% SC enrolments, 0.36% ST and 18% OBC enrolments. SASTRA University, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, VIT and other prominent institutions also showed low enrolment rates from marginalised communities.
Only 0.46% of the faculty in these top 30 private universities are from STs, while 30% of the teachers recruited are from OBCs.