Dont bet on backwardness

Don't bet on backwardness
The formulaic approach to reservations should be abandoned in favour of more subtlety and sensitivity. This would be an unequivocal gain for the cause of social justice, instead of plotting acts of institutional vengeance   

Sukumar Muralidharan Delhi 

The Supreme Court, on March 29, 2007, imposed an interim stay on the application of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admissions) Act of 2006, throwing well-advanced admission procedures in these institutions into considerable disarray. In introducing legislation for reservation of seats for "socially and educationally backward classes", the court held that the government had been inattentive to material realities. 

It is a curiosity of India's policy on reservations that its legislative foundations are rather thin. Mandal II, or the move to reserve seats in higher educational institutions run by the central government, was indeed the first occasion that a law was enacted, rather than the customary 'government order' on reservations. That this first attempt by Parliament has encountered a judicial roadblock is a bitter blow to the political establishment in Delhi. Coming after a sequence of several other such rulings by the court, this has led to much resentful murmurs about the judiciary as an institution becoming an impediment to social justice. 

Yet, with all the arguments that have been produced in making the case for reservations, there has been little attention devoted to its actual track record as an element of social policy. As a well-known media commentator recently observed, for all the importance of reservations in India, the best work on the efficacy of this manner of undoing the disadvantages of history have come from scholars overseas. In India, reservations are simply not a matter where cool logic and rational argument can be applied. 

If, for a moment though, the passions and partisanship were to be kept aside, certain key findings on reservations would seem relevant. It has been found, as it would be intuitively obvious, that students benefiting from reservations generally under-perform in relation to those who gain their admission through the 'open category'. Their rates of graduation also tend to be lower. On this account, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they would probably perform less well than the open category candidates who risk being displaced by the reserved quotas.   

Outside the university setting though, once the candidates have graduated and entered the workforce, there is no reason to believe that their performance is any less efficient or useful to society. Reservations, in other words, contribute to the democratisation of decision-making in society. They also engender significant benefits in sectors where people-orientation is necessary, since the individuals performing these tasks are likely to be more understanding and empathetic towards the disadvantaged.   

It has also been found that over time, there has been a convergence in the qualifying requirements: the gap at entry level between the beneficiaries of reservations and the open category candidates has been narrowing over time. But there is little to suggest that the beneficiaries are being drawn from a broad-based section of the target groups. In fact, the better off among the backward classes have gained and continue to gain disproportionately from reservations.