What the UGC Stay Actually Suspended

In a February 2025 affidavit to the Supreme Court, the University Grants Commission (UGC) reported receiving grievance cell data from 3,522 of India’s 58,643  higher education institutions. For a student at any institution outside that count facing caste-based harm, the only institutional route is the police. The UGC Equity Regulations 2026, notified on January 13, were the first instrument in over 18 years of advisories and committee reports to make the creation of the grievance cell mechanism mandatory.

On January 29, a Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi stayed those regulations on writ petitions filed by Mritunjay Tiwari, Vineet Jindal and Rahul Dewan.

An Article 14 challenge was used to stay the first mandatory mechanism designed to make the right to equality operable for the students least able to enforce it themselves. The direction that produced the regulations had come from the same bench on September 15, 2025, after a petition filed by the mothers of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi and the bench that ordered the mechanism into existence suspended it four months and 14 days later. The stay has not been vacated.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Two months on, the academic session is now underway. The matter was listed on March 19; no order has been reported since, and the stay remains in place. The 55,121 institutions that did not report having a grievance cell probably still have none.

The UGC’s circular of June 26, 2019, one of several such communications since 2011, asked vice chancellors to constitute committees for SC/ST/OBC discrimination complaints. The operative word, in the 2019 circular as in those before it, was “may”, and none of it was required. The Thorat Committee had identified this gap as early as May 2007, finding that 84% of SC/ST respondents at AIIMS reported their grades were affected by caste and that the institution had no functioning complaints committee.

The pattern held across every advisory in between; the 2026 Regulations were different in kind. They mandated designated officers, prescribed response timelines, required direct UGC oversight and attached penalties for non-compliance. When the Supreme Court stayed them and directed institutions to operate under the pre-existing guidelines instead, it was not preserving a neutral status quo.

From the Thorat Committee report in May 2007 to the notified regulations in January 2026 is over 18 years; from the notification to the stay is 16 days. The general category unions at Delhi University described the regulations as a “mob lynching regulation” and before the notification was two weeks old, students had assembled in front of the UGC office in protest.

The deaths that eventually produce regulatory responses share a common institutional address of Union government funding, national alumni networks and the visibility to ensure that what happens inside reaches Delhi.

On March 6, 2025, Sunil Bairwa, a 28-year-old Dalit MBBS student at Kota Government Medical College, was found hanging in his hostel room after his father alleged sustained mental harassment by the college administration. The police initially registered the case as suicide and a murder case was registered only in June 2025, three months later, after the State Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes directed the police to act, with no reports of a UGC committee being constituted at any point in the process.

In January 2026, Vishal Gautam, a Dalit BAMS student at Guru Dronacharya Ayurvedic Institute in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, died in a road accident near campus. His family alleged the accident was staged following sustained ragging by upper-caste seniors and an FIR was registered against six students and the college management under BNS sections 105 and 61; the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act was not invoked.

What each case lacked was a legally mandated institutional forum before the police. Under the 2026 Regulations, Kota Government Medical College would have been required to designate an officer independent of the administration allegedly harassing Bairwa, with a mandatory response timeline and direct UGC escalation if that timeline was breached. Guru Dronacharya Ayurvedic Institute would have been required to do the same for the ragging complaint that preceded Gautam's death.

Before the Supreme Court passed the stay, the UGC had itself submitted data to the bench showing a 118.4% rise in reported caste discrimination cases at higher education institutions, from 173 in 2019-20 to 378 in 2023-24, and that data was before the court when it acted. The Modi government admitted in parliament in December 2024 that equivalent data for state-affiliated colleges and regional universities does not exist in any centralised form. Where no grievance cell exists, complaints generate no data point.

In December 2025, a professor at Government Law College in Churu, Rajasthan allegedly publicly called Meena Meghwal “Chamari”, told her that studying law was not her place and subsequently awarded her failing marks in her practical examination.

Meghwal, a 30-year-old Dalit LLB student, submitted a written complaint to the college administration and when no action was taken for two months, she approached the police, who, on February 27, 2026, registered an FIR under sections 3(1)(r) and 3(1)(s) of the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act.

Under the 2026 Regulations, Government Law College would have been required to designate an officer independent of the administration that ignored her complaint, with a mandatory response timeline and UGC escalation rights if that timeline was breached.

The protest that positioned itself as a defence of fairness while opposing the only mechanism designed to make fairness enforceable is a defence of the arrangement that made Sunil Bairwa, Vishal Gautam and Meena Meghwal invisible to every institution the protest claims to be protecting.

In the colleges where no grievance cell exists, the session now underway is like every other one, distinguished only by the fact that for the first time a mechanism to end that condition was notified, challenged and judicially suspended before a single designated officer had been appointed anywhere it was needed.

Rahul Verma is an independent researcher and sociology educator.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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