Reservations:

The whole of India is talking about reservations. NDTV, CNN-IBN and a whole lot of bloggers come up with exactly the same reasons as to why they all oppose reservations. No one’s thinking differently , the topic at hand by itself is quite old and beaten to death, I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to discuss a totally clichéd topic in a slightly different way.

Alright, so here goes it:

Now let’s take the 2 options we got at hand.

Option 1 – No reservations. What happens? India’s population is currently around 1,000,000,000. Out of this around 50% is effectively illiterate (this is different from actual illiteracy). If there are no reservations (assuming that the rate at which illiterates and literates contribute to our population growth is exactly equal), this percentage will remain the same (if not, illiteracy will increase). It’s not wrong to assume that 70% of the parents who are literate will educate their children properly, and 70% of the parents who are illiterate will NOT educate their children properly. In the remaining 30%, people like Rahul Mahajan and Sunil Bharathi Mittal will balance out. Educated folks like Rahul will effectively be illiterate (as they don’t behave like educated people anyway) and smart people like Mittal will be very literate even though they didn’t go through any formal education.

So, if we chose option 1 – India will continue to be the same. 50 % illiteracy will continue , the economic divide will keep expanding, and we all should sit back and hope that we’ll have more and more Sunil Mittals and Dirubhai Ambanis and fewer Rahul Mahajans.

Let’s take option 2. Say we have about 25% reservations. Let’s say 80% of the people who use this 25% reservation, are actually backward (the other 20% are people who buy OBC certificates - thanks to NDTV). These people will move into the literate category. Out of these people, let’s say 80% are effectively literate, we have 16% more people who are literate. Hope you guys got the complicated math here (0.8*0.8*0.25*100). If this were a case interview, I would have said: This sounds too high, let’s make it 10%.

So, what do we have now? 10% of the people would have moved from the illiterate to the literate category. Because of reservations, is there a chance that some people can move from the educated to the non-educated category? Nopes, no way. People, who planned to study medicine, might miss out studying medicine because of the reservations but they could always study something else. Maybe they could become a journalist and join NDTV and fight against the reservations. Basically, there’s no chance that someone who would have been in the educated category will become an illiterate because of reservations. Correct?

So, approx 10% of the people move from the non-educated side to the educated side (if our politicians implemented this whole thing properly- now that’s a whole new ball game). So, if we have to make a decision keeping in mind the overall growth of India, option 2 doesn’t sound too bad.

I know a lot has been said about how illiteracy should be corrected at the grassroots level and how the government should find ways to educate kids at the middle-school and high-school levels and not use reservations as a method to achieve whatever growth they are talking about. This is a point well-made, and a lot of organizations are working towards this. But thinking very carefully, reservations if implemented properly might not be a bad thing. Changes at the basic school level should happen in tandem with reservations.

There are a lot of other questions that need to be addressed. Is 25% an optimal number? We’ll be sacrificing some Sabeer Bhatia’s to gain a decent number of BPO engineers, but that’s the trade-off we’ll have to consider. There’s obviously more thought that needs to go into picking the right % for reservations, but the idea itself is not bad. The sad part is, no one – not anyone from NDTV, not anyone from Congress, not anyone from IIT/IIM has come up with some analysis on what this number should be, why it should be so etc. etc. There’s just blind opposition or support for/against reservations and that’s just very sad to know.

Update(from the comments section): Just so that more people can understand this point of view better:

Just wanted to add to that. I am not arguing for the sake of arguing here(Like in most other cases). I am just trying to assess the situation from a different angle.Take for example our class at SVCE. Say we had some 6 people from SC/ST ( rightly deserved SC/ST ) , I am pretty sure they are doing quite decently for themselves right now. Maybe SVCE helped them be in a position they are right now. Now, since those 6 people got into SVCE, some FC people went to SRM, Hindustan etc. Had they taken 7 people into SC/ST, then Murari ( who was the last person to get into EE Payment at SVCE) would have missed out and gone to SRM. Murari would have done fine anyway. He might have even gone to Stanford had he gone to SRM. But, the 7th SC/ST person might have needed SVCE's placement help to actually get the same job. Though this was added to get some comedy into the picture, hope you get my point !