EOC Releases Inclusion and Diversity Survey

The Equal Opportunity  Cell (EOC) released its campus-wide Inclusion and Diversity Survey on October 22. This marks the cell’s first major data-gathering effort since its constitution.

In an email to the student body, EOC student representatives Avika Mantri (UG’28), Aditi Parmar (UG’ 29), Suman Morwal (PHD) and Manoj (YIF ‘27) said that the survey would help the Cell understand forms of discrimination students face on campus, shaping how it can effectively address them. The survey asks whether students have faced negative experiences based on their identity and whether such experiences involved faculty, staff, students or the institution. It also invites students to volunteer and contribute to organising future sensitisation workshops, making it a proactive exercise.

Speaking to The Edict, Aditi Parmar (UG ‘29), EOC UG Representative, said the survey grew out of the demands that initially led to the EOC’s creation. In November 2023, following protests organised by the Social Justice Forum (SJF) demanding a formal body to counter on-campus discrimination, former Vice-Chancellor Somak Raychaudhary committed to setting up the EOC. 

Parmar also clarified that the Inclusion and Diversity survey is the same one that past members were working on. A previous iteration was called the socio-economic survey. This time, it was formally named the Inclusion and Diversity Survey to capture a broader scope beyond caste demographics. 

“This is the first thing on our agenda,” Parmar said, adding that the survey did not come out more than two years after the cell’s functioning. Parmar attributed this delay to a lack of consensus on methodology, something that past representatives also echoed in The Edict’s last report on the EOC in November 2025. The survey’s release also resulted from efforts by the new student representatives within the EOC, ultimately being rolled out once the consensus was reached among members. Past representatives were worried about self-selection bias, and the Cell agreed the fix was to secure a large number of responses. The remaining difficulty was strategising how to get them. “We just pick from where it was left earlier that we need a lot of responses,” she said. 

EOC has not yet analysed any responses. “We haven’t started looking at the results so far,” Parmar said. The immediate priority is participation: “It needs to represent a good percentage of Ashoka,” she said, stating that some statistics will eventually be published. “Eventually the data will come out,” Parmar said, though she gave no timeline as of now. 

Commenting on safeguards, Parmar pointed to the survey’s anonymity. “Not all questions are mandatory,” she said. Students who are uncomfortable sharing details can skip them. To widen participation, EOC has sent a call for support to stakeholders, including department representatives. To encourage PhD students' participation, Aditi said, “We [are] still brainstorming strategies.”

The Inclusion and Diversity Survey can be accessed here and can be filled out only by Ashoka students using their institutional email ID. The Edict encourages all Ashoka students to fill out the survey.

(Edited by Anamta Husain and Gauri Deshpande)

(The quotes in this article were not verified the first time it was published. The Edict sincerely regrets this lapse.)