Anti-quota stir is misguided: In defence of affirmative action

Three groups have played a critical role in it: upper caste-dominated guilds like the Indian Medical Association; industrialists and owners of private colleges, who oppose any extension of reservations even for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes; and Bharatiya Janata Party politicians.

Among those who joined the agitation were Information Technology executives, and "event management" specialists, who charge hefty fees. Industrial tycoons tried to kill AA in collegesso it can't be extended to private business.

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A year's delay in quota implementation means that capitation-fee colleges and private institutions, with an intake of over 534,000 students, make landfall profits of Rs 1,000-2,500 crores by selling seats meant for OBCs.

Regrettably, even the National Knowledge Commission played a partisan role in the whole business. First, it publicly opposed OBC reservation. Then, two of its members quit, adding grist to the anti-AA mill.

The agitation's rationale had nothing to do with the public interest. Rather, it was a highly individualistic urge to defend privilege. The bulk of the agitators are children of the new middle class which has burgeoned under post-1991skewed, inequality-enhancing, economic policies.

Many of them don't see their own unprecedented prosperity and rising incomes as the result of larger economic processes, such as higher rates of savings, macroeconomic policies, or globalisation, which has generated new divisions of labour, creating opportunities, for instance, in IT and related services.

Even less are they aware that their own prosperity is the obverse of the squalor of the majority and the further squeezing of India's most backward regions. Rather, they attribute it to their own "merit" and initiative, thus perpetuating the status quo.

The agitation targeted the fundamental principle of AA itself. Had it succeeded, India would have lost the hard-earned gains of the social reform movement and turned its back on the imperative of correcting the distortions and inequalities caused by unbalanced growth.

The agitation's supporters take refuge behind many specious (or half-valid) arguments: that AA will kill "merit"; that OBCs are already fairly well-represented in many professions, according to a 1999 National Sample Survey Organisation estimate; and the benefits of quotas will inevitably be cornered by the OBCs' affluent, influential "creamy layer".

The "merit" argument is bogus in a society based on inheritance of property, and privilege related to birth. This means that the affluent are at a vastly different starting-point from the disadvantaged. Merit makes sense only when it measures the distance between the starting-point and the end-point. Most upper-caste people enjoy unfair advantage because of their higher starting-point.

Merit is only one, small, component of achievement. It isn't easy to measure, quantify or compare. In public recruitment or admissions, other criteria are equally relevant: for instance, gender, ethnic, and regional balance, and diversity.

The fundamental point is that a person born in an educated upper-crust family will have a totally different universe of knowledge and social contactsand wholly different access to information about the availability of colleges and courses, career options, professional advice, etc. S/he can always call "Uncle" so-and-so in the civil service or the medical profession to get tips.

Typically, such advantage outweighs differences of wealth. Past discrimination continues to produce inequality of opportunity even when there is no discrimination at present. The critical issue is how to level the playing field so as to give genuinely equal opportunity to the disadvantaged.

Affirmative action offers the best solution. It can take many forms, including voluntary targets for recruitment of disadvantaged groups, special counselling, diversity promotion programmes, etc. Reservations, admittedly, are a rather blunt instrument. It can be validly argued that India has used reservations as the sole form of AA. But we should not make the best an enemy of the good.

As for the argument that OBCs have nearly the same representation as their population share in numerous professions, the evidence from NSSO is dubious. NSSO is simply not equipped to identify local caste groups. That's is the job of specialised anthropologists, sociologists and historians familiar with caste configurations which vary from district to district.

The "creamy layer" argument is certainly valid. Social and educational backwardness is a changing phenomenon. There is upward mobility among the OBCs. But their upper layers need not automatically corner quotas. They should be excluded from doing so along the criteria specified by the Supreme Court in the Mandal judgment.

After all, at maximum, only half of India's OBCs (52 percent of total population) can get accommodated under the 27 percent quota. This must be the lower half.

It would be ideal in the long term if different institutions could devise varying AA formulas based upon different criteria besides casteincluding gender, economic status of family, quality of parents' schooling, backwardness of region of origin, etc. Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University has a decade-old admissions policy which gives extra points to OBCs, women and regional backwardness over and above a candidate's entrance examination score. This has significantly raised JNU's OBC intake.

Some social scientists have proposed AA formulas assigning different weights to these factors. Despite their drawbackse.g. wantonly opening up the settled SC/SC quota issue, or providing at best a marginal boost to OBCsthese proposals should be seriously debated.

However, the topmost priority last fortnight was to beat back the challenge posed by the anti-quota agitation, which opposed the very principle of affirmative action.

The UPA government did well to uphold the principle. Wisely, it didn't resort to the undesirable device of phased implementation. But it will have to increase the total number of seats in Central educational institutions by 54 percent within a year, at estimated expense of Rs 8,000 crores.

This is a formidable, but worthwhile, task. One can only hope that the upper castes accept reservations in the spirit of a caring-and-sharing society.

Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.