I get the distinction you’re trying to make between institutional and cultural casteism. But the idea that caste discrimination isn’t institutional, especially in colleges or workplaces, doesn’t hold up to evidence.

First, in India, there have been multiple documented cases of caste-based discrimination within higher education institutions. The suicide of Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad wasn’t just about “culture.” Similarly, Payal Tadvi, a resident doctor at BYL Nair Hospital, died by suicide in 2019 after documented caste-based harassment by senior colleagues. That happened inside a major urban medical institution, not a rural village.

These aren’t isolated anecdotes. Surveys by student groups and faculty collectives in institutions have repeatedly reported caste-based slurs, social exclusion in labs and hostels, biased grading perceptions, and informal gatekeeping in mentorship. When students from marginalized castes are overrepresented in dropouts and suicides in elite campuses, that suggests structural patterns, not just stray prejudice.

Second, the idea that “a college won’t reject you for your caste” overlooks how discrimination often works today. It’s rarely written into policy. It operates through interviews, recommendation letters, viva voce exams, networking, and informal referrals. In hiring, studies using matched resumes have shown that applicants with upper-caste surnames receive more callbacks than equally qualified applicants with Dalit surnames. That’s workplace discrimination operating before any law can intervene.

And this isn’t confined to India. In 2023, the city of Seattle became the first U.S. city to explicitly ban caste discrimination after advocacy groups documented cases in tech companies where Dalit employees reported harassment and career stagnation tied to caste identity. In 2020, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a case against Cisco Systems alleging caste-based discrimination against a Dalit engineer by upper-caste supervisors. Regardless of the legal outcome, the fact that such a case could be filed in Silicon Valley shows caste bias can travel with diaspora communities and embed itself in corporate environments abroad.

So the clean separation between “institutional” and “cultural” casteism is harder to maintain in practice. Institutions are made up of people, and when bias affects grading, mentorship, hiring, promotion, housing allocation, or peer evaluation, it becomes institutional in effect even if not in written policy.

As for reservations, it’s fair to debate their design and effectiveness. But historically, they were introduced precisely because formal equality under law did not prevent systemic exclusion in education and employment. If access to elite spaces was shaped by centuries of graded inequality, then neutral rules alone don’t level the field.

You can argue about the best tools going forward. But saying caste discrimination doesn’t exist institutionally because there are laws against it ignores both documented cases and the way modern discrimination actually operates.