Reservation: The Vicious Cycle

By giving the central government six weeks to explain the rationale for the definition of the OBCs, and for fixing quotas for them in all institutions of higher learning, the Supreme Court has given the country a brief reprieve from the introduction of reservation in all institutions of higher education�public and private. It has asked all the right questions. What is the rationale for defining the underprivileged solely on the basis of caste? How will simply allocating quotas to them in institutes of higher learning remedy their disadvantages? And how will the government implement these quotas without destroying the institutions? But in the end, it is only a reprieve. The Constitution has been amended and the amendment must be implemented. So let us see what reservation will mean in concrete terms.

SJ is a Brahmin, but he works as a cook and earns Rs 2,500 a month. With his employer’s help, he has acquired land, built a small house, brought his family from the village. SJ has put his two sons in a modest English-medium school in the capital, where they are doing well. Till the other day, they had a fighting chance of getting into one of the top colleges of the city. That has grown dimmer now. Does SJ’s being a Brahmin make him any less disadvantaged than a Kurmi from Gorakhpur with 40 acres of land? Should his sons suffer because of the accident of their birth?

The PM is acutely aware of this implicit reverse discrimination. That is why he announced a 54 per cent increase in the total number of seats in elite colleges. This will keep the absolute number of seats for the ‘merit category’ unchanged. The shortage of faculty will be met by raising the retirement age to 65 and rehiring those who haven’t got there yet. The government has even calculated how much this will cost�around Rs 7,200 crore in new buildings and equipment, and Rs 3,200 crore or thereabouts in salaries and consumables. But will these measures solve the problem?

Here is what will actually happen. In 1990, during the first Mandalisation wave, all the institutes of management got a letter from the HRD ministry. It went somewhat as follows: Please ensure that all categories of students, including SC/STs, are evenly distributed through all grades of achievement and are not found bunched at the bottom. As human intelligence is randomly distributed and doesn’t favour caste or creed, evidence of bunching at the bottom will be regarded as a dereliction of their duties by the institution.

Deeply disturbed, the faculty of IIM-Bangalore decided to institute special classes for their SC/ST students. But when the time for the first tutorial came, no one turned up. On enquiry, some of the eligible students told the faculty that they didn’t want to be identified as belonging to the reserved categories. Not only would this create a schism between them and fellow students, it would also hurt their campus recruitment chances. When the V.P. Singh regime fell, the entire faculty of IIM-Bangalore heaved a sigh of relief. So did thousands of other professors in the country’s other centrally-aided institutions of higher education (IHES).

When the students from the reserved quotas come up against curricula designed for those with IQs of 135-145 and the best of secondary and college education, most of them will inevitably get bunched at the bottom. Will the IHES then get another letter from the HRD ministry? The harsh truth is that sooner or later reservation will further dilute standards, create two categories of graduates and irretrievably tarnish the reputation for excellence of these institutions.

Will it at least improve the lot of the reserved quota entrants? We would be in a better position to answer this question if the government had published figures on what proportion of the present reserved quota entrants have gone on to secure scholarships or jobs abroad.But perhaps not by chance, no such data has ever been furnished or, one suspects, even collated. The truth, one suspects, is that reservation casts a stigma on even outstanding students from the SC/STs and OBCs, one that they have to live with for all of their lives.

Finally has the government thought of what reservation in the IHES will do to the economy? What will it do, for instance, to the 100-billion-dollar, several million-job health tourism industry that is on the verge of take-off today? The fact is that it will kill it stone-dead, and what will be lost will be not just foreign exchange but also millions of jobs.

Native intelligence is indeed randomly spread but it has to be honed by education and education begins at birth. For 60 years, no Indian government has tried seriously to give children of the SC/ST/OBCs the first-class education, with special streaming for gifted children, that would have enabled them to get over their inherited disadvantages. To then throw them into some of the most fiercely competitive institutions in the world is both cruel and callous.