from business world of 15 april 2006
Think of a
better option
SOON after the
Janata Dal (S) came to power in Karnataka last November, H D Deve Gowda asked
Bangalore’s IT industry to stop complaining about the city’s infrastructure. He
said that it was his duty to spend on rural Karnataka, and that Bangalore could
not expect to gobble all available resources. It was not a very intelligent
point to make. Of course a state
government has to balance demands of different sections and regions; it is
possible to make and explain such compromises. Deve Gowda was not being a
statesman; he was being a politician. He aimed to score brownie points with
rural people without spending a penny on them; the more Bangaloreans screamed,
the more he would gain.
There is a bit
of Gowda in Arjun Singh. He wants the educated middle class to make an unholy
racket about his proposal to reserve 49.5 per cent of seats in educational
institutions for other backward castes (OBCs). The bigger the noise, the more
credit he would earn with the Communists, and the more votes for the Congress.
The casualty in
this grandstanding is serious thought. Reservations have been with us for seventy years - they were first
introduced in the Madras Presidency in the 1930s. They have not been a complete
failure, but the number of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe (SC/ST) persons
in government remains far below quota. Further, evidence suggests considerable
inequality in the distribution of jobs. Second-generation educated candidates
and candidates from a small number of well-off castes have received the bulk of
the jobs. If the objective was to give jobs to SC/ST persons, there has been a
modest success; if it was to redress a social injustice, there has probably
been a massive failure. This impression is based on a very small body of occasional
evidence generated by official bodies and a large dose of impressions.
Paucity of
serious thought is no surprise in the government; but one would have thought
that the considerably educated Prime Minister, who at one time did research of
some quality, would have tried to answer for his own satisfaction how effective
reservation policies had been. Assuming that he came to the above conclusion -
it is hard to imagine how he would come to any other - he might have been
expected to look for an alternative policy. In his approach to Pakistan, he has
gone about enthusiastically looking for ‘out of the box’ solutions; why should
they be confined to Pak policy? SC/STs deserve them more.
Obviously, if
enough SC/STs were jumping through the hoops which regulate entry to
educational institutions - SSC, CAT, JEE etc - they would not need reservation.
Reservation is a policy of educating people who do not have the minimum skills.
Upper-caste people are upset that increased reservation will reduce seats
available to them. It may not if the number of seats is increased in
proportion. That would not be economic if the full fees of the entrants into
reserved seats are not paid by them or the government. In that event,
upper-caste students will experience both a shrinking of seats and an increase
in fees.
Will they then
go abroad? There is a great opportunity for Australia, Singapore, Sri Lanka,
Dubai - and let us face it - China to cream off Indian students. But that will
benefit only the rich ones; the poorer ones will be priced out of higher
education. Their only fault will be that
they were born in the wrong caste. Some will no doubt correct an ancestral
error and buy fake caste certificates. When Chandrababu Naidu investigated
hostel accommodation given to SC/ST students in Andhra Pradesh, he found that
most of them were SC/ST only by official construction. Officially aided and
abetted fraud is likely to be no less rife in other states.
This is to say
that reservation is only a rough-and-ready instrument of social justice. It was
so recognised from the beginning. That is why, initially, it was meant to last
only for a few years. But every policy of special favour creates vested
interests that prevent it from being terminated. So it has happened with
reservation. That is why no one except a handful of beneficiaries believes that
the policy is justified, and why everyone looks so cynically at the
government’s manouevres, whatever the motivation behind them may be. This is
how people’s respect for our form of government is eroded; that is why the
government must look for and learn from the lessons of experience in making,
reversing and improving policies.
Not only the
government, but the private sector as well. For the threat of reservation hangs
over it too. As the Congress sees it, the cost to it of private sector
reservation would be zero. That is why the private sector should invest in
generating knowledge about how reservation has worked till now and what would
be a better alternative.
