Reservation: Strategic or Tactical?

Following up on my previous post on the proposed reservation for OBCs at premier institutes in the country, I would like to question the concept of reservation from a planning standpoint. For the purpose of this argument, I will forget that laws are made by politicians who have a vested interest in certain vote banks and will only try and look at the general interests of the nation.

Let's track back a few decades and we see a nation that has a caste hierarchy and certain castes whose peoples have been subjected to ill-treatment, denial of human rights and a significant portion living way below the poverty line. However, these are not the only people below the poverty line or living in these conditions. There are others who belong to supposedly higher classes in the hierarchy.

Now, the goal is the upliftment of all people below the poverty line as opposed to retribution for sins committed against a certain sect of people.

We all know that education is the proven route to upliftment of people. Now tough though it is to implement, the ideal solution is to provide free and compulsary primary education and this is something that has been promised by the government for decades.

What, you would ask, happens to those people from these segments who have grown up beyond the level of primary education? What do we do to improve their lot? That is where Reservation as a tactical solution comes in. A tactical or short term solution is meant to provide temporary relief from a problem that needs to be addressed on a larger scale, which would take time and call for a strategic solution, which by definition is long-term and would take time to implement.

Now, you can't make a tactical solution permanent. You figure out how long it will take to implement the long-term plans and set a deadline to terminate the tactical solution. In this case, assuming a lag of 2-3 years for the idea of reservation to pick up, and another 14 years for the children getting free primary education to finish high school, put in a buffer and let's be conservative in our planning to add a 100% buffer. That's a total of 34 years.

So the solution looks something like this:

• Provide reservation in educational institutes, jobs for 34 years at the end of which all reservation will cease to exist.
• In parallel, you build infrastructure to provide free and compulsary primary education to all children from economically backward segments.

This is what we needed to do when the idea of reservation was first brought up. Here we stand 59 years from our Independence, with a caste-based reservation system, which is taken for granted by the beneficiary segments and has the potential to cause dilution of brands which the country is most proud of.

Yes the Government did not deliver, was corrupt, ate up all the money sanctioned for primary education and yes, the economically backward classes should not suffer for it.

However, there are certain institutions which are respected for the quality of students they admit and the rigour that these students are put through. To avoid diluting these national assets, aid be provided to students from the backward classes to prepare for entrance exams conducted by these institutes.

So here is what I propose:

1. The Government gives an explanation of why free primary education is not a reality today, and commit to a plan for implementing it at the soonest.
   
2. The Government stop discriminating on the basis of religion/caste. It goes against the secular nature of the country.
3. The Government provide financial aid to students from economically backward segments so that they can train for entrance examinations.
4. The Government exempt premier institutes from reservation which should be made redundant by point 3.
5. The Government provide a timeline when reservation in non-premier institutes will lapse.
   

Just because they cannot deliver on the promise of free primary education, it does not give the Government the right to choose the easier and more destructive way out of the problem, that of ensuring a higher education or a career in the absence of good primary education.

The Government does not have a right to split Indian society into parts which have vastly different definitions of literate, educated, merit.

To expect a Government to do this is maybe a pipe dream, but then somebody dreamed 60 years ago that India will have educational institutions that the world will respect and that dream is true today, so, to quote John Lennon:

You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will be as one!

Tags:

• Reservation
• IIT
• IIM
• Mandal
• OBC
• Arjun+Singh
• Education