: Why Insensitivity to Inequality plagues the Indian Engineering Community #WorldNEWSAll Most elite engineers live in a bubble of corporate comfort and narrow meritocratic worldview limited by convenient

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Why Insensitivity to Inequality plagues the Indian Engineering Community #WorldNEWSAll
Most elite engineers live in a bubble of corporate comfort and narrow meritocratic worldview limited by convenient idealistic assumptions.
Engineering as a career is accorded high regard all across India, seen by its sizable and growing middle class as an escalator to economic prosperity. India’s premier engineering institutes – The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the National Institutes of Technology along with a dozen or so elite private institutes, are highly glorified and romanticized. The dream of becoming an engineer is passed on generationally and is spontaneously assumed to be the default career ambition for most middle-class students.
Engineering Entrance-Exam Preparation forms the bulk of India’s private coaching industry. Engineering test-coaching is estimated to be tens of thousands of crores in worth. In spite of categorical reservation quotas for students from socio-culturally underprivileged communities being in place for decades, the engineering community is dominated by savarna (so-called upper caste) males. Leading positions in the industry and academia continue to be disproportionately occupied by upper-caste males. These power structures have reportedly manifested even in the Silicon Valley.
Most of the Indian society has deeply-entrenched systematic discrimination, bias, and exploitation on lines of caste and gender. Despite the provision of affirmative action in the form of categorical reservation of seats in engineering admissions, the various faultlines of socioeconomic inequality are still prominent. Students from underprivileged backgrounds suffer from lack of awareness, mentorship, conditioning, connections and support network, and access to premium coaching.
Further, once they join colleges for pursuing their engineering degrees, they face tacit, and in some cases, even explicit discrimination, neglect and ostracization by their peers.
At many elite engineering colleges, the toxic, stiff competition continues and with their limited resources and experience, underprivileged students face a vicious cycle of low baselines, slow progress, and high expectations.
They suffer from deep-seated intensifying insecurities and develop anxieties regarding their status, identity, performance, deservingness, financial assurance, band confidence in their ability and potential.
This leads many to harbour low self-esteem, inferiority complex, impostor syndrome, and similar psychological setbacks. The vicious cycle intensifies as the factors feedback into one another, affecting their learning and mental health. The dearth of faculty members from their communities only adds to this.
Finally, when the students graduate and sit for campus placements to join various recruiters arriving on campus, the lack of any private-sector affirmative action measures largely negates most of the disparity moderation yielded by categorical admission compensation.

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