[India] There we go again

The Govt. of India has decided to increase the % of reserved seats in institutions which are controlled by the central govt. This will include among many others the IITs. Currently 22.5% seats are reserved for people who fall in the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) category. A few seats are reserved for foreign nationals (usually non-resident Indians) who pay higher tuition and so are a source of extra income for the IITs. According to the new proposal 27% of the seats will be reserved for people who fall under the Other Backward Caste (OBC) category. So less than 50.5% seats will be open to people who fall under the general category. The competition to get into IITs was brutal to start with. Now if you are a general category candidate you will be in the 'Male Indian Engineer trying to get into Stanford in the 3rd round' zone.

Many people have condemned this move saying that it will dilute the brandname of IITs. Well yes it would. As would the government's plan to nearly double the number of IITs. But I am not one of those who considers the IIT brandname to be an end in itself. If diluting the brand is good for the country - especially for its poorer sections then I am all for it. But the people who have decided to implement this policy haven't bothered to argue how reserving seats in IITs would lift OBCs out of poverty. In order to even appear for the IIT entrance exams, you need to have completed 12 years of schooling. How many poor OBCs will get that far? If the Govt had real interest in doing good for OBCs it would have created conditions (through incentives) to allow poor OBCs to get educated till the high school level. And then introduced this reservation to give them a leg up into elite institutions. This is what will happen now. Poor OBCs will continue to drop out of school because they have to work to support their families or their schools just don't function because the teachers don't show up. Middle class and upper middle class OBCs who have all the opportunities that every other middle class person in India has will get a back door entry into elite institutions. Since they won't have to go through the rigorous competition that everyone else has to go through, the quality of these elite institutions will suffer.

During the time that I attended IIT 22.5% seats were reserved for SC/ST candidates. None of the people I knew who fell in that category came from poor backgrounds. Most of them were middle class people (like me) and some were quite rich. I never understood how making it easy for them to enter IITs helped the poor SC/ST people in any way. And I am not even talking about fairness here. SC/STs and OBCs have been screwed by mainstream Indian society for so long that I don't even care if a policy is unfair to mainstream society. But it has to be effective, something this policy is definitely not. Of course anecdotal evidence can't stand in for raw data. If anyone has pointers to studies which have investigated the effectiveness of reservations in India, please do let me know.

This reservation policy was first proposed to be implemented in 1989. Back then all hell had broken loose. India in 2006 is very different from India in 1989. So I don't think anything similar is going to happen this time. But if even some discussion happens in the mainstream media then it will be good. Not because this policy has any chance of getting reversed. No political party wants to antagonize vote banks. In fact a few years back this policy was approved in principle by a overwhelming majority in the Parliament. No, I think there is another reason why any discussion on development or poverty will be useful. I often feel that in the euphoria generated by the soaring economy, middle class India has forgotten that most Indians are still quite poor. I am as guilty as anyone else of this ostrich like attitude. If this discussion wakes some people up to the fact that a lot still remains to be done about poverty in India, atleast some good will come out of a policy which is destined to fail.

(For a good research article on poverty in India go here.)