“Should The IITs Have Humanities Departments At All?”, Swarajya, 01 Oct 2026.
“With the protests over the suicide of a second-year BTech student, Sahil Wakode, at IIT Bombay, a tangential argument resurfaced: whether the IITs should have humanities departments at all.
Critics alleged that the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) students and their professors at the institute were fuelling the protests over allegations of caste discrimination.
While the sharpest of the critics went to the extent of demanding the closure of the humanities departments across the IITs, others pointed out the issue was specifically how these departments were run in the country.
The humanities are not newcomers to the IITs. IIT Kharagpur set up its HSS department in 1951, the year the institute opened, and IIT Kanpur followed in 1960; IIT Bombay and IIT Madras built theirs early too.
But for decades, these were service departments. They taught engineering students compulsory courses in subjects like English, economics and philosophy and supervised PhDs on the side from the 1970s, instead of having their own undergraduate or master’s students………”
Read the full article at Swarajya.
