Does this help anybody?

Recently the HRD ministry in India made known its desire to have 49% reservation for ST and SCs in institutions of higher education (IOHE). It came as a shock to me and I can not understand how can anybody in the world justify this. So I am going ahead and putting down logical arguements against the ones used my the goverment while comming up with such policies.

1) Education is important for everybody and since ST and SCs figure with lowest literacy percentage they should be given reservation.

Education is important for everybody hence make sure there are more schools so that everybody can get free education. IOHEs should intake students solely based on merit.

2) The higher cast are monetarily better off hence have other resources to benifit from while preparing for exams for these insitutions.

Now this is one thing that comes up very regularly. I strongly oppose this statement. First, Its not always that higher cast people are monetarily better off and have better resources. If you want to help the poorer people act at a more basic level i.e. have reservations for economically backward groups (EBG) and not socially backward (SBG) ones.

Infact, I can go ahead and say that if you do have to give reservations then it should be for people coming from villages. This is so because I feel its not money but the resources which affect preparation to enter into these IOHE. And even the the EBGs in cities have access to better resources than rich people in village.

But inspite of all this I feel these people should be helped with resources and money rather than just giving reservation to them. Take all the groups of the scoiety to a level ground and after that it should be competition. The way its being done now, the country gets worser engineers, doctors and researchers and the brighter ones get bogged down. I would say it also affects the brighter students among the reserved castes. I am sure they would not work as hard if they know their chances of getting into these institutions is very high.

** Also I would argue that its a general trend that ST and SCs are always economically more backward. Actually Ithink its funny for a such a statement to arise in a country like India where Ambani's, Premiji's and Tata's exist. Wow!! not one of them happens to be from higher cast.

3) Even after 60 years of reservation ST and SCs are still backward communities hence percentage of reservations should increase.

I will try to argue against this with two points. One, actually if you see there is a class of SCs and STs who have benifitted from these policies more than other. Take the case of the first generation who benifitted from these policies, the family has come up both socially and economicaly but the children still use these policies and are benifitted a great deal.

So within the reserved castes there is skewed competition. Obviously the huge percentage of reserved catogories are still backward because they have to compete with the developed half of their own for the reserved seats and no doubt they lose. So the ones who have benifitted from these policies long back are continuing to exploit it whereas the new ones can do nothing but just watch and ponder why even after so many steps by their lovable government they are still backward.

****I would have no problems with these reservation plicies if there is an added clause that if one or two generations of a family has benifitted from these pollicies then they are no longer eligible for reserved seats and jobs.

Second arguement is - yes, if something has not worked for 50 years dont you think that may be because there is inherently a flaw in the policy or its implementation and we should try to find that out rahter than still conitnuing it.

I dont know about all of you out there but I seriously get very upset with the whole thing beacuase I can not voice my opinions in a valid forum where somebody hears to them and answers me. Please leave comments about this situation, write your own opinions and may be later these can be compiled and sent over to some better forum.