Regarding Reservations

Yesterday, I can across an article in 'The Statesman' where the author (Samantak Das) expresses his opinion opposing the ongoing agitations against the increase in reservation seats. Feeling inclined to key down my thoughts regarding what he said, I write this post.

So, first I'll put up his extract from the paper:

I have recently read two illuminating texts, one a column printed in this newspaper, the other a Bangla leaflet delivered along with it. Both of them speak in impassioned prose about the need to oppose the proposed 27 per cent reservation for Other backward Classes in institutions of higher education. Both invoke the rhetoric of "us" versus "them", both oppose reservation to "merit", both raise the spectre of deprivation for "your meritorious son or daughter". One asks, passionately, if somewhat incoherently, "for how long do we have to keep lying to our children, telling them that true worth will forever attain its prize while you continue to deny half of what rightfully belongs to them", while the other prophetically warns me that "someone less worthy than you will occupy the position in your workplace that rightfully belongs to you".

Trying to match their pleas to my own experience, I'm not quite sure what these worthy gentlemen mean either by "merit" or what "rightfully belongs" to me. By merit do they mean the sheer accident of birth that led to my privileged middle-class upbringing, education in an exclusive English-medium school, exposure to books and elevating conversation practically from the egg that enabled me to gain admission to one of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in the country where I received an education practically gratis? And do they deem someone who comes from a family that belongs to the 80 per cent of out country that subsists on less than Rs 90 per day, who went to an ill-equipped sarkari school, neither of whose parents could read or write, forget about books or suchlike in their homes, less meritorious than me? Do they mean to say that college and universities that are paid for by the tax revenues generated from even humblest economic transactions (such as, for example, when a daily-wage worker buys a bundle of beedis) should be reserved exclusively for the likes of me?

Who is more meritorious, the pampered child of parents who can afford an army of tutors to coach their ward for the entrance examinations to colleges of engineering or medicine, or the child of unlettered parents who grows up in a world that spits the fact of their lowly status in their faces on a daily basis, yet who, through sheer dogged endurance manages to achieve a passing grade in high school and dreams (against all odds) of becoming a doctor or engineer one day?

It is true that whatever a person becomes at the end of his school life is indeed largely affected by his social background - by his family, by the school he read in, and other such factors which are controlled by his 'birth'. That is, the true merit can be overshadowed by the conditions of his birth, which are in turn largely correlated, even today, with his caste.

But in spite of this, notwithstanding however unjust the process undergrown maybe, would you question that as the net result, at the point of applying for higher studies, a candidate with a higher rank have somehow become more suitable, efficient and deserving than a candidates with a lower rank, in any field of study?

Then, on what criteria would you justify the selecting of less suited candidates for the next stage of education and training, over the more suited ones? Because, you say, the process in the previous stage was faulty and failed to extract and endorse the true potentials? But how exactly will this partial selection amend for the faulty process, or improve upon the already developed suitability (a result of 18-21 years) of the less deserving ones?

For any developmental process, it is common knowledge that the best suited candidates from one stage be selected for the next stage of development. For the clarity of reasoning, on dividing the entire course of training of an individual starting from basic education to becoming a trained professional, we can get two broad stages - the pre-college (school) stage and the college/professional training stage. If the pre-college stage has some faults in it which bars it from transforming the truly meritorious candidates from this stage as the best suited ones for the next stage, then should one rather not focus on rectifying this process?

Lastly, exactly what percentage of the misfortuned people do you exactly cater for 'upliftment', when you make reservations in apex institutions like IITs and AIIMS? What percentage of these people, born of illiterate parents, living below the poverty line, does actually cross the 10+2 board exams, or even the 10th standard board exams? I think 20% would be a gross overestimation. Does this not make the reservations in these institutes look like half-hearted evasive measures? What is really needed to bring up these people? Why not do something that would really cater to these people - something definitely at the more ground level?

(P.S.: The figure 20% in the last paragraph is completely a guesswork.)