Why caste based reservations are such a disaster

The way to hell, we are told, is paved with good intentions. It appears
that some such folly has been committed with regard to reservations
policy — whether for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes or with other
backward classes/castes — in this country. When it was mooted at the
time the Constitution was adopted in 1950, none other than BR Ambedkar
had viewed the reservation measure as a short-term affair which needed
to be reviewed at the end of 10 years. He did not envisage
reservations as a permanent system of entitlement. The authors of the
reservation policy knew what they were doing. They saw it as a way of
remedying an imbalanced situation. They meant well, but it turned out to
be something else.
It is unfortunate that in this country there
were not enough people to voice honest criticism against the idea both
at the time it was launched and in later years. Long before the term
‘political correctness’ was coined, India’s chattering classes seem to
have observed a conspiratorial silence about a key issue in the life of
the country.

Had there been honest criticism and debate about reservations, it
would have served as a good counterpoint. What was needed was a periodic
review of reservations and a report on what was achieved and what was
not. But it was not done. It was an act of national intellectual
cowardice.


Even today, the opposition to reservation does not emanate
from public intellectuals but from upper class and upper caste students
who do not understand the implications of the reservation policy. So it
becomes easy to knock down their half-baked objections.
The case
against reservations needs to be made on behalf of those who are
supposed to benefit from it. If people say that there is a case for
reservation after decades of a positive discrimination policy, there is a
need to question the efficacy of affirmative action as such.
It
is true that the entrenched upper castes and upper classes in this
country would not welcome any policy measure that would break their
privileged perch. But they would not have been able to hold on to their
blinkered position because of the natural expansion in the economy.
The
country would have needed more skilled people than could be provided by
the small number of the traditional elites. It was the compulsion of
markets that opens the doors for outsiders. At the beginning of the
industrial revolution, women and children became part of the factory
workforce not just for the cheap wages but because there was need for
those extra hands. It is the same in the case of immigrants in Europe
and in the United States.
India’s economic growth cannot be
sustained by a quarter of the population as constituted by the upper
castes and upper classes. The logic of economic expansion requires that
those from the other strata, classes and castes have to enter the
mainstream of education, jobs and consumers.
Unfortunately,
growth has never been considered a factor in social progress in
political debates in this country. The reason is that political leaders
took upon themselves the role of enlightened reformers who wanted to
share their privileges with the deprived masses in a gesture of
generosity, and they wanted to appear as knights in shining armour. It
is a case of rhetoric more than anything else.
A look at the
reservations policy over the decades shows that it has been a rather
inefficient model because it was not accompanied by expansion of
educational and job opportunities. The remedy does not lie in
perpetuating reservations but in finding a more effective way of opening
up opportunities for all.
Instead of fighting over smaller
slices of a small pie of national income, what is needed is the
expansion of the national pie which would help everyone to get their
rightful and bigger share of the slice. The oppressed and the
marginalised people need expansion of opportunities rather than favours
from the state.
http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_why-reservations-are-such-a-disaster_1265190