Palak paneer row at US campus ends in $200k settlement, return ticket home for Indian students: Report

A dispute over heating a lunch of palak paneer at a campus microwave escalated into a civil rights lawsuit and a $200,000 settlement, ending the US academic careers of two Indian PhD students and prompting their return to India, The Indian Express reported.

According to the report, the incident dates back to September 5, 2023, about a year after Aditya Prakash joined the University of Colorado Boulder’s Anthropology Department as a fully funded PhD student. While heating his lunch at a departmental microwave, Prakash said a staff member approached him, complained about the “smell”, and told him not to use the microwave. The smell was “pungent”, she said, according to Prakash.

Prakash told The Indian Express that he did not lose his cool and replied firmly, “It’s just food. I’m heating and leaving.”

The matter, however, did not end there. Further, in September 2025, following a federal civil rights lawsuit, the University of Colorado Boulder reached a settlement with Prakash and his partner, Urmi Bhattacheryya, also a PhD student. The university agreed to pay the two $200,000, confer Master’s degrees on them, and bar both from future enrolment or employment at the institution. This month, the couple returned to India permanently.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Prakash described the episode as part of “systemic racism”. He said, “The department also refused to grant us Master’s degrees that PhD students are awarded enroute the PhD. That’s when we decided to seek legal recourse.”

In the civil lawsuit filed before the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, the couple alleged that after Prakash raised concerns about “discriminatory treatment”, the university “engaged in a pattern of escalating retaliation”.

The lawsuit referred to a departmental kitchen policy that had a “disproportionate and discriminatory impact on ethnic groups like South Asians”, stating that it made many Indian students wary of opening their lunches in shared spaces. The “discriminatory treatment and ongoing retaliation”, the suit said, caused “emotional distress, mental anguish, and pain and suffering”.

Responding to the query, the university spokesperson Deborah Mendez-Wilson said: “The university reached an agreement with the plaintiffs and denies any liability. The university has established processes to address allegations of discrimination and harassment, and it adhered to those processes in this matter. CU Boulder remains committed to fostering an inclusive environment for students, faculty and staff.”

Prakash said that after the food-heating incident, he was repeatedly summoned for meetings with senior faculty, accused of making “the staff feel unsafe”, and complained against at the Office of Student Conduct. Bhattacheryya said that she lost her teaching assistant job without warning or explanation.

She also said that when she and three other students brought Indian food to campus two days after the incident, they were accused of “inciting a riot”. Those complaints were later dismissed by the Office of Student Conduct, she said.

Prakash, who is from Bhopal, and Bhattacheryya, 35, from Kolkata, come from middle-class backgrounds and have invested heavily in pursuing PhDs in the US. The first year, he said, passed without incident, with Prakash receiving grants and funding and Bhattacheryya’s research on marital rape being well received.

Everything changed after the microwave episode for Prakash. “My food is my pride. And notions about what smells good or bad to someone are culturally determined,” he said. Recalling an argument that even broccoli was prohibited because of its odour, Prakash said he responded that context mattered. “How many groups of people do you know who face racism because they eat broccoli?”

Linking their experience to wider political changes in the US, Bhattacheryya said, “There is a hardening, a kind of narrowing of empathy. Institutions talk a lot about inclusion, but there is less patience for discomfort, especially if that discomfort comes from immigrants or people of colour.” As an international student, she added, “The message wasn’t always explicit, but it was there: you are here conditionally, and you can be made to feel that very quickly.”