By Karthikeya S
For over 50 days now, Dr J Padmaja has been engaged in a lone fight for employment, justice, and fair treatment.
She has been protesting in front of the entrance to the Osmania University (OU), Hyderabad, Telangana, campus since as early as November 2023, alleging caste and gender discrimination at the hands of OU Vice-Chancellor Prof D Ravinder Rao, as well as the OU Teachers’ Association.
Dr Padmaja, who obtained a PhD in chemistry in 2013, belongs to the Mala caste – which is classified as a Scheduled Caste (SC). She alleges that she faced discrimination at OU even before her admission into the varsity for her PhD.
“Back then, there was no entrance test for PhD admissions. Essentially, students who completed their MSc and MPhil from OU were directly admitted into PhD. This resulted in a lot of favouritism,” she alleges, saying that this process opened doors to practices of nepotism and corruption in PhD admissions. “I was refused admission to PhD, and told that it was because I belonged to an inferior caste,” she alleged and added that “third-class MSc graduates from OU” were preferred over her.
However, her woes did not end once she was finally admitted into the PhD programme.
Discrimination by the admin
“From day one, the administration and teaching staff alike harassed me based on my caste and gender,” Dr Padmaja recounts. She claims experiencing casteist barbs as well as sexual harassment from her PhD supervisor, retired professor Ch Anjaneyalu, and the then VC of Osmania University, S Satyanarayana.
When she tried to file a police complaint against the duo for continued harassment in 2013, her complaint was not accepted by the police. However, the harassment she faced only intensified ever since.
“I was singled out, isolated from my batch, and targetted by the VC,” she claims, adding that she was even barred from entering the common laboratory by her guide, and was made to work in a separate laboratory – a practice she deems to be “a form of untouchability and ostracisation”. Even when she was pursuing her research work in another laboratory, she alleges being harassed and attacked by goons on the orders of the VC.
Despite all this, Dr Padmaja managed to submit her thesis and obtain her PhD in Electrochemistry in October 2013.
This story was originally published in edexlive.com. Read the full story here .