Accepted Panels

The enrollment of women in STEM courses in India has increased in recent years, but the representation of women in engineering education, particularly at elite institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), remains low. To address this issue, the government introduced the supernumerary scheme in 2018, which added additional seats for women at IITs. However, there has been no systematic study that examines the practical and everyday dimensions of the policy and the experiences of students who have gained from it. The goal of the study is to understand the possibilities and limits of policy interventions to redress the extreme gender imbalance in the B.Tech. degree at the elite IITs. The study uses narrative ethnography based on interviews and publicly available material to explore  perceptions and experiences of  the scheme  at IIT Delhi. Key questions that the study seeks to answer include: 1. How do male and female students (and faculty members) perceive  the scheme and how has the scheme impacted the lived experiences and self-perception of female students? 2. Does the perception of the scheme as “reservation for girls” result in an “impostor syndrome”?  3. Is the scheme treated differently from caste-based reservation and what is the experience of girls who fall into an intersectional category? 4. Finally, has the scheme influenced parental attitudes toward educating daughters in the field of engineering?