A fresh look at Reservations and Quotas
This has been one of my longest posts in the making…taking almost two months since I first started putting down my thoughts on this issue.
To a large extent this was because I wanted to be able to capture as many viewpoints as possible in writing this post and to get accurate references.
This has been such a “loaded” subject that I hesitated a lot before venturing into it. At the same time, it is not a topic that any seriously concerned citizen can shy away from.
So please consider this as an humble and modest attempt at trying to understand what may be wrong with the current system. Hopefully this will help us to get it right and really achieve what we set out to do - viz. improve the lot of under-privileged and deprived sections of our society.
While doing my background research, I came across a number of articles and blogs on this topic but not enough that had a pro-reservation slant. I did come across a few counterpoints – e.g. Sujai has a series of posts with a pro-reservation slant which make for interesting reading (and no doubt some arguments) and Krish’s blog too has quiet a few posts on the topic (e.g. this one) – but they were few and far between.
So this analysis too may suffer from an intrinsic bias that creeps in after looking at something from only one side of the prism. Back to “reservations” and “quotas”.
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This post was precipitated by the recent disruption and agitation in Rajasthan regarding the demand of Gujjars to be categorized as Scheduled Castes from their current status as OBCs.
The demand was an indicator of a fundamental problem with the whole system – it has largely become a system of patronage & dispensing largesse and a way to capture a slice of the “lucrative” government jobs and other benefits.
To an observer who may not be familiar with the reality of caste-based politics and reservations in India, the Gujjar demand may have appeared to be strangely regressive.
If you look at it from a purely rational and logical viewpoint, it appeared absurd. Why would a group wish to reclassify itself as even more backward? – and that too several years after having been the beneficiaries of a system designed to uplift their status?
