I have been meaning to comment on the recent protests in most Indian cities against a Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) proposal to extend reservations in IIMs and IITs. Sixteen years after the initial protests against the Mandal Commission recommendations, this issue has come up again. Not surprisingly, Indian intelligentsia has weighed in.
While much of the press coverage and reaction in the blogosphere has predictably been along class lines, there are some interesting and pragmatic responses too. Satish Deshpande and Yogendra Yadav offer alternative proposals in a two part article in The Hindu: part 1 and part 2. Their attempt to go beyond the terms in which this debate is framed (merit and social justice being the two poles) is an interesting exercise in both social science thinking and public policy formulation. As they point out, outside the realm of politics, public life in India is still disproportionately dominated by the upper castes. In that sense, not much has changed since late 19th century. Yadav and Deshpande explain this phenomneon by drawing our attention to the ’social mechanisms through which innate ability is translated into certifiable skill and encashable competence’. Reservations may not be the only way to address this issue but also consider this absurd situation in the centers of excellence that Indian state has built. Deshpande and Yadav state:
In a situation marked by absurd levels of “hyper-selectivity” — 300,000 aspirants competing for 4000 IIT seats, for example — merit gets reduced to rank in an examination. As educationists know only too well, the examination is a blunt instrument. It is good only for making broad distinctions in levels of ability; it cannot tell us whether a person scoring 85 per cent would definitely make a better engineer or doctor than somebody scoring 80 per cent or 75 per cent or even 70 per cent.
In short, it is only a combination of social compulsion and pure myth that sustains the crazy world of cut-off points and second decimal place differences that dominate the admission season. Such fetishised notions of merit have nothing to do with any genuine differences in ability. The caste composition of higher education could well be changed without any sacrifice of merit simply by instituting a lottery among all candidates of broadly similar levels of ability — say, the top 15 or 25 per cent of a large applicant pool. (emphasis mine)
Lottery, anyone? Part 2 has some sensible suggestions.
Swami Agnivesh and Valson Thampu question the way we define merit academically and turn the question around. While I have some reservation about their strict constitutionalism, Agnivesh and Thampu made several important points. Here is one damning indictment of the doctors:
Doctors should be the custodians of the health not only of individuals but also of society. ……. But to serve society, one has to know it. To know is to engage; and to engage is to love. Very often ignorance results not from the dearth of information but from the lack of love. We are ignorant because we are indifferent. And we are indifferent largely because we are self-absorbed. Self-absorption implies an outlook that limits one’s relationship to the larger context — the country in this instance — wholly to what one may get out of it. This implies blindness to what one can do for the country.
But then I loved this comment!
The anxiety that the proposed reservation for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) will subvert merit seems plausible but is, in fact, purblind. Much depends on what we mean by merit. In this country of vast socio-economic disparities and inequities, it is unjust and misleading to define merit in an academic fashion. Shall we not say that merit, in the context of health care, should also include compassion and the spirit of service? (emphasis mine)
Is compassion being quantified? Are internships or work in a clinic taken into account while admitting someone to AIIMS?
Passions are running high but the stakes too are high.
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