A Mother’s Endless Wait for Justice: How One Tragedy Sparked a National Debate on Campus Discrimination

For more than six years, 60-year-old Abeda Tadvi has been living a life divided between grief and hope.

Twice every month, she travels nearly 500 kilometres from Jalgaon to Mumbai for court hearings — a journey that drains both her savings and her spirit.

The trial connected to the death of her daughter, Payal Tadvi, has still not begun.

A retired zilla parishad employee, Abeda now measures every rupee from the pension she and her husband, Salim receive, carefully budgeting for travel and legal expenses.

Each adjournment, she says, feels like reopening a wound that never healed.

Payal, just 26 years old, was a postgraduate medical student who died by suicide in 2019 following alleged ragging and caste-based harassment.

Her death would later become a turning point in a larger fight for accountability in educational institutions.

While searching for answers that year, Abeda connected with Radhika Vemula, who had lost her son Rohith Vemula to suicide at the University of Hyderabad three years earlier.

Both mothers believed that existing systems meant to protect students from discrimination had failed catastrophically.

Together, they approached the Supreme Court of India, seeking strict enforcement of the University Grants Commission’s 2012 rules against caste-based bias on campuses.

Their petition eventually led to the framing of the UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026 — reforms aimed at strengthening protections for students from marginalised communities.

The new regulations mandated Equal Opportunity Centres in institutions, fixed accountability on heads of colleges and universities, and aimed to improve grievance redressal systems.

They were designed to address years of poor implementation of earlier safeguards.

However, the regulations soon found themselves at the centre of controversy.

After being notified on January 13, they were stayed by the Supreme Court just two days ago following challenges by petitioners who argued that the rules excluded general category students and were vague enough to invite misuse.

While placing the regulations on hold, the court raised several concerns — questioning their approach to ragging linked to caste, the idea of separate hostels, overlapping definitions of discrimination, and the possibility of abuse of loosely worded provisions.

For Abeda, the stay feels like yet another delay in a long struggle.

“I only hope this doesn’t mean the regulations are abandoned altogether,” she said. “They were created after years of discussions and expert consultations.

We believed they would finally bring meaningful change to educational institutions.”

She described the proposed equity centres and monitoring committees as crucial tools that could prevent students from suffering in silence — something she believes could have saved her daughter.

Her pain is deeply tied to the memories of Payal’s final months.

“I was so proud of her,” Abeda recalled. “She was the first woman in our community to pursue postgraduate studies in medicine.

If proper systems had existed, she would have had a place to complain, a place to be heard. Instead, she felt scared to speak up.”

Payal was studying gynaecology at TN Topiwala National Medical College and BYL Nair Hospital in Mumbai when she was found dead in her hostel room on May 22, 2019.

She had earlier told her mother about repeated harassment by seniors, including taunts about securing admission under the ST quota as a member of the Tadvi Bhil community.

According to Abeda, her daughter was never informed about any grievance mechanism meant for SC/ST students.

No action was taken under the 2012 UGC regulations, which explicitly prohibit discrimination such as labelling students as “reserved category”.

“If these rules existed and were followed, why did our children still suffer?” Abeda asked. “Radhikaji and I didn’t even know such safeguards were there until we lost them. We came together so no other parent has to go through what we did.”

Nearly six years later, justice remains elusive.

Three doctors — Bhakti Mehare, Ankita Khandelwal and Hema Ahuja — accused of abetment of suicide, ragging, discrimination and destruction of evidence, are yet to face trial.

Proceedings have been stalled for almost a year after the state government removed the special public prosecutor, shortly after the trial court added the former head of the gynaecology department as an accused for allegedly ignoring Payal’s complaints.

The Bombay High Court stayed the trial, and both the department head’s appeal and the state’s decision to remove the prosecutor are still pending.

The accused were granted bail in August 2019 after spending over two months in jail.

They were allowed to resume their postgraduate studies at the same medical college and even had their medical licences restored. Applications filed by them seeking discharge from the case have also not been decided.

Abeda says assurances of compensation and a government job for Payal’s brother, who has a physical disability, were never fulfilled.

“It feels like everyone else has moved on with their lives,” she said quietly. “But we are still fighting to be heard.”

For Abeda, the stalled trial and the uncertain future of the new UGC regulations represent more than legal delays — they are reminders of a system that, in her view, continues to fail the most vulnerable.

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