IIT-Kgp revamps Gymkhana admin for gender parity

Kolkata: In a bid to bring about balanced gender representation and transparent governance, IIT Kharagpur has restructured the administration and roles of various officials of the Technology Students' Gymkhana (TSG). It is now mandatory to have female representation in all domains, including sports, cultural, and technological activities and fests.Joint Implementation Committee data showed that one in five BTech students are women in IITs. Female students comprised 19.2% at IIT Kharagpur in 2025. Director Suman Chakraborty acknowledged that there is a gender imbalance in all IITs. "We need a national policy to address this issue. Internally, we can change the environment and mindset of people by increasing female representation in certain areas. The restructuring of the Technology Students' Gymkhana by amending the statute can be a classical example of this, maintaining gender parity," he said.Before the restructuring, there were 22 faculty members in the administration, out of which there were 16 males and six females (excluding the president and honorary treasurer). The new structure now has eight male and eight female faculty members (excluding the president and honorary treasurer)."Generally, administration is dominated by males. So it was a conscious decision to bring about a balance in the male and female representation in the Gymkhana administration in the backdrop of increasing female students every year. Since we are trying to highlight Gymkhana as a student engagement centre, it was necessary to bring about gender parity cutting across all sectors — administrators to domain experts such as sports, technology, cultural affairs, and welfare. The holistic representation of human resources will help us to execute different activities seamlessly and focus on gender issues as well," added Chakraborty."The aim of the new system is to have efficient and transparent governance, which should be visible to all stakeholders apart from maintaining gender parity in the administration," the director said.