This story has also been published on the EADI Blog

I grew up in a family shaped by the complexities of colonial misadventure in Calcutta, a refugee past marked by economic hardship and structural violence. For my mother, merit was the only way out. She believed that humility, hard work, and academic excellence could open doors that history had closed. As a child and young adult in South Asia, I absorbed this moral ideal without question.

It was only later during my time in student politics at Scottish Church College and the University of Calcutta, and much later at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) that I began to see how this belief had been quietly re-engineered. What my mother envisioned as a set of desired human traits had been reframed by society into a culture of meritocracy. I do not know whom to blame: our past, which demanded resilience, or our present, which turned merit into an individual badge rather than a collective benefit. This personal journey became my starting point for questioning how we define and reward merit in today’s academia and for exploring whether Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) can help rescue merit from the shackles of meritocracy.

From Merit to Meritocracy

From ancient times, merit was understood as a system of reward for contributions that advanced societal goodness or upheld moral rightness. It was tied to action and to the social fabric. Modern institutions, however, have appropriated merit as a static, absolute quality. Today’s meritocracy often privileges standardisation over diversification, quantification over qualification, and the personification of “excellence” over the actual social value of contributions.

In higher education, this has contributed to a polarised debate: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) versus Merit, Equity, and Fairness (MEF). The US Supreme Court decision to annul DEI measures in academic and professional spaces illustrates this tension. MEF proponents argue that group-based inclusion should give way to purely performance-based selection to promote “true” talent. For me, the challenge is not to choose between acronyms, but to reimagine higher education so that it delivers just and equitable outcomes for society, without losing sight of merit’s original role as a social good.

Human Capital Development and the Meritocratic Pitfall

Human capital investment, vital for social, economic, and international development, is often derailed by meritocratic structures that prioritize individual achievement over collective progress. Education should empower disadvantaged groups (women, ethnic minorities, and economically marginalised communities), enhance employability and productivity, and foster global peace and cooperation. Yet, in practice, meritocracy entrenches inequalities that undermine these goals. A compelling countermodel is SEWA in India, where investments in human capital through organizing, skill-building, and cooperative networks empower women to collectively transform their economic circumstances.

Global tertiary education enrolment between 1970 and 2020 has risen, yet disparities persist: North America (84.03% in 2014) and Europe (62.07%) far outpace South Asia (20.84%) and sub-Saharan Africa (8.59%). These gaps reflect both horizontal education inequality (HEI), such as disparities across gender, ethnicity, or language, and vertical education inequality (VEI), or class-based stratification.

A UNRISD project on Universities and Social Inequalities in the Global South highlights how meritocratic systems, emphasising standardised metrics like test scores, favour those with pre-existing advantages such as access to elite institutions, while marginalising others. Increased availability through expansion and private-sector provision often fails to translate into meaningful access, as disadvantaged groups face financial, geographic, and social barriers. Despite rising enrolment, socioeconomic status primarily determines who benefits, locking in intergenerational privilege. Thus, expanding seats alone is insufficient; equitable access must be intentionally structured to overcome persistent exclusion. Availability (individual choice shaped by income) often outpaces accessibility (social choice reliant on policy and infrastructure), limiting social mobility for disadvantaged groups. By prioritising individual “excellence,” meritocracy reinforces class barriers, undermines the equitable distribution of human capital benefits, and perpetuates elite dominance, derailing education’s transformative potential.

DEI: Remedy or Reproduction?

At its best, DEI addresses horizontal inequality. But too often, it functions as a project of liberal multiculturalism by boosting representation without transformation. It may create opportunities for individuals from underrepresented groups, but without confronting class-based barriers, it risks producing individual greatness without collective mobility.

In my own teaching and mentoring, from Jawaharlal Nehru University to the Geneva Graduate Institute and now in Tampere University, I have tried to move beyond opportunity towards outcome. For example, in my courses, I emphasise context-specific case studies tailored to each student’s geography. This way, students not only present their own contexts but also engage with others’, fostering mutual learning. While I cannot claim that this produces perfectly equal outcomes, it embodies the principle that diversity and inclusion must be more than symbolic.

The same concern extends to epistemic diversity. DEI initiatives may diversify who participates in academia, but not necessarily what knowledge is valued. Faculty hiring in Europe and North America, for instance, often adheres to DEI principles, which genuinely increases diversity in gender, ethnicity, and nationality, but rarely includes PhDs from outside these regions, which is subtly reinforcing a narrow epistemic canon. Faculty members’ undergraduate and master’s level affiliations with Global South universities are not sufficient to claim genuine knowledge diversity, as it is at the doctoral level that pedagogical enquiries are most profoundly shaped and developed. In such cases, DEI risks becoming a meritocratic tool that preserves a monopoly over knowledge rather than challenging it.

Intersecting Inequalities with Epistemic Justice

To truly decolonise knowledge for development, DEI must evolve into a framework that addresses both structural and epistemic disparities. For student intake, this means first tackling horizontal inequality by ensuring equitable access for ethnic, gender, and linguistic minorities, and then addressing vertical inequality within this group through targeted measures such as financial aid and infrastructural support. For faculty intake, it requires confronting epistemic inequalities by prioritising the subjective assessment of pedagogical diversity, contextual expertise, and academic competencies over conventional metrics. These conventional metrics, such as publication in high-impact factor journals (where article processing charges can be four to five times the monthly salary of a full-time professor in developing or least-developed countries) or the criterion of holding a PhD from legacy universities in Europe or North America (where tuition fees, even after stipends, remain inaccessible to most from oppressed groups) often perpetuate exclusion. If decolonisation is genuinely a goal for higher academia or government education bodies, these priorities must be embedded in policy reforms and enforced through legal action. By simultaneously intersecting horizontal and vertical inequalities and dismantling ‘epistemic reservation’ in faculty hiring, we can “unchain” merit from the confines of meritocracy and restore its purpose as a driver of collective good rather than a showcase of individual excellence.

Decolonising Merit

Decolonising knowledge is not merely about diversifying classrooms or curricula; it demands rethinking the very metrics of excellence, for if these remain tied to Western-centric, market-driven logics, inclusion alone will change little. As Ansoms (2024) argues, true epistemic decolonisation requires vulnerability in research and the willingness to listen to marginalised stories beyond predefined frameworks to avoid reproducing colonial knowledge hierarchies. This entails embracing uncertainty and discomfort in academic inquiry, allowing researchers to co-create knowledge with communities rather than imposing external paradigms. This shift calls for valuing multiple pedagogical traditions, rewarding contributions to collective flourishing, and recognising education as a shared human project. Merit, therefore, need not be discarded but reclaimed and restored to its original role as a driver of social good. 

My own journey began in the postcolonial cosmopolis of Calcutta, from a modest background that shaped my understanding of inequality and deprivation. It has taken me from working with communities in Indian villages and urban slums, to collaborating with policymakers in South Asia, forging diplomatic negotiations with international bureaucrats in Geneva, collaborating with global academia in European institutes, and engaging with diverse global student cohorts. These experiences have shown me that DEI is not an endpoint but a starting point, one that must be coupled with dismantling vertical inequality, ending epistemic reservation, and reframing merit in collective terms. Only then can human capital development fulfil its true promise: advancing not just productivity, but also social justice, international solidarity, and the flourishing of all.

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Acknowledgement: This reasoning owed much to several discussions and debates I engaged in at College Street Coffee House in Calcutta, the dhabas (open-air eateries) of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the JNU PHC 2.0 Group, and the writings of Amartya Sen, Ben Okri, Aníbal Quijano, and Paulo Freire. I was especially thankful to Retired Professor Rama Baru of Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health for her unparalleled classroom teaching that connected academic discourse with real-life inequalities. My sincere thanks also go to the Transnational Institute (TNI), in particular Fiona Dove and her team, for shaping the campaign on the internationalisation of epistemic justice. I was also grateful to participants at the Development Studies Association Conference at SOAS University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies) in 2024 for their valuable comments on my presentation, ‘Merit, Meritocracy and Human Capital Development’.

Amitabha Sarkar is a Public Health Fellow at the Health Sciences Unit of Tampere University, Finland and also a Research Associate at the Albert Hirschman Democracy Centre in the Geneva Graduate Institute.