After reading enormous amount of material in newspapers, listening to discussions in hostel... all on the reservation controversy, I write another blog on the same. First of all I congratulate Shri Shri Shri Arjun Singhji as he has succeeded in getting all the publicity that he would have wished for. I guess publicity was his aim (Social welfare was not his target we all know) and he achieved it.
Normalize Reservation: Do not compromise on quality
Yesterday I was talking to my friend Debo about this issue and he said that reservation has to be brought in allowable limits. Moves to bring about social welfare and equality should not discourage meritocracy. The IITs and IIMs should be allowed to decide the percentage relaxation in marks that the reservation category get. Amongst the ones who achieve it, we give admits to as many as alloted by a quota which is definitely not a freaking 50%. This takes care of a scenario where general category cut-off is 50/100 and reservation category cut-off is 20/100. The doctors who get into med-schools with these 20/100 with the aid of reservation are no better than my grandma in medicine.
Gap at bottom: Currently, reservation is a necessity to bring social equality because backward classes do not have access to good schooling and thus can not get into professional colleges on grounds of performance alone. What they really need is good schooling. The government should harness its resources and fight hard to provide them with quality primary and secondary education. By not doing so they have created a gap at bottom. By not fighting for lower caste school going kids, they have created a huge gap in knowledge and capabilities of lower and upper castes kids. Reservation is just a way to cover up for their lack of efforts in this regard by compromising on meritocracy.
Stories of our revolution: Stories of Indian lollipops
Very often we have got our acts of revolution wrong. The policy makers have often found incentives (like reservation) to bring about changes which do not address the root cause of the problem instead aggravate it. Thus those incentives are no more than giving lollipops to sick kids to keep them quite; they need medicine. Examples follow:
When we actually needed to aid our farmers with proper infrastructure of electricity and water, we gave them subsidies which created deficit prone budgets. We called it the green revolution. It was a revolution only in a few places where the agricultural infrastructure was good, not the ones with subsidies. We realized this only when the World Bank became stiff on us. Subsidies on fertilizer can not be substitutes of water and electricity. The government is indirectly responsible for the deaths of the numerous farmers who committed suicides due to various reasons.
When we needed to eradicate the "License Raj" so that our traders and entrepreneurs feel encouraged to grow, struggle and still survive in market, we opted to protect them from global firms. In the process we made them incompetent. Look at the fate of numerous PSUs that got enough corporate protection. Only PSUs that faced competition did well. We were always scared that our firms will never be able to sustain competion from MNCs. With the current growth and advance of Indian firms everywhere we can assume that Indian businessmen are no less competitive. Instead, we should have let them go out and let others come in (in short liberalize and globalise), so that they could learn to sustain competition. Eliminating competition is no way to guarantee learning and growth, struggle in tough conditions is.
There are many examples of similar apathy of policy makers towards grievous problems. The comman thread running is - irrespective of the government, leader and coalition formations, our politicians have always tried to look for lollipops instead of real solutions.
Reservation - The lollipop for backward classes.
Reservation is one way of dividing people. I explain. If you have ever been to a college, you would realize how much discomfort the talk of reservation can bring to a heterogeneous group. The way reservation is implemented right now, the backward classes gaining admission are not particularly as proud of their achievement. Due to the way it is implemented right now, a lot of stupid general category entrants regard themselves as superior when they actually aren't. Had the backward classes been given equal opportunities for schooling and then be allowed to enter colleges through the same tests as general category, they would have been equals. Reservation has not brought equal status to backward classes. They are rudely classified as the incompetent among the qualified. Root cause of misery of backward classes is a big question in India. Their population is large and the human resource in them in still untapped. Constructive moves to uplift their social and economic status have to be taken. All reservation does is to give them a false promise meanwhile bring down the only credible intitutions India has like IITs and IIMs.
We are looking for people who can give us medcines, not lollipos. Any volunteers?
2 comments:
Totally agree on the "gap at the bottom" part. Providing education oppotunities to 5000 odd people in all the centrally funded institutions does nothing for the development of the "backward" sections.
However, providing more schools does nothing for the politician - it is more difficult and nobody in the media bothers about it. Even worse, it probably won't even draw any recognition from the voters themselves. Sadly, a common view of education is as a device for making money, - which implies that high school education is useless! No one places a premium on basic school education as it does not even give the educated children the means to earn their livelihood better (in a short term).
This debate ll nvr end, my frnd!
Anyway, u r da first Naresh I stumbled upon!
Keep posting!
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