Meritocracy is a social system in which people hold positions exclusively based on their abilities. But India as a democracy undertakes several measures to reduce the inequality caused by historical prejudices by showing positive discrimination like caste based reservations.

The Indian Institutes of Technology were established after Independence to create trained technical personnel of international standards for the nation. In order to establish “merit” as the only criterion for admission into these institutes, they were originally exempted from policies of reservations. Extant structural inequalities ensured that only the “already-privileged” could find their way into these spaces of “merit”. As a result, these institutions have until recently been almost exclusively populated by the upper castes, who, through the instruments of merit, were able to transform their caste capital to modern, “caste-less” capital.

All this changed with the introduction of a 22.5% reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in 1973 and 27% for Other Backward Castes in 2006. This has transformed the IITs into heterogeneous, complex and often volatile, politically-charged spaces.

The encounter of the ideologies of meritocracy and of caste in the spaces of IIT Bombay throws up interesting, difficult questions. This film is an attempt to identify, articulate and interrogate the complexity caste brings to the IIT Bombay campus by exploring the stories of people who are part of it.

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