OBC Reservations

Written below is the opinion of a IIT prof. Who has been working in the elite institution for long.

Nearly six decades after independence, this country is planning toannounce that majority of its population is backward and does nothave equal opportunity to pursue education and employment. Alongwith this, it is going to open up a Pandora's Box by various castegroups to be classified as "backward". What an interesting way tobegin the 21st century when finally India was beginning to emerge asa serious player in the new knowledge economy! The major carrot thatis being doled out is the seats in the elite medical, engineeringand management Institutes. What bothers me is no one is interested in even consulting the people who have built these Institutions andbrought them to this stature. I have strong views on efficacy of reservations in general but here I would confine myself to theissues concerning IITs. At least here with my three decade long association, I can claim to know something. Many of these argumentsmay be applicable to the other elite Institutions in medical andmanagement disciplines as well.

Today IITs are considered excellent educational institutions. Thereis a countrywide scramble to get into these with many studentsspending the best part of their teen years in preparing for itsentrance examinations. This should not be confused with ranking ofuniversities where just a couple of IITs make it in the top 500.These rankings deal primarily with the research output and not with the quality of undergraduate education. I can confidently say that any ranking of quality of undergraduate engineers produced would put IITs in the top 20 worldwide if not in the top 10. And it is thisachievement that is going to be hard to maintain with the proposedreservations policy.

IITs have had reservations for SC/STs for decades. Why would this be different? Aren't these students likely to be better prepared than the students admitted under the existing reserved category? Here Iwould like to share some of the facts with the readers. IITs have been admitting SC/ST students for years under two modes. From the general category, a significantly lower JEE cutoff is decided and reserved category students scoring above this cutoff are admitted directly to the UG programmes. Another still lower cutoff is decidedand reserved category students from this set are admitted to a one year preparatory course conducted by IITs themselves. After passingthis course, they can join the programmes without having to appearin JEE again. Even this exercise collectively yields less than 15%in IIT Delhi though the quota amounts to nearly 22.5%. Half of the reserved category students manage to clear courses comfortably while the other half struggle on the margins. What would be called a good performance (cumulative grade point average or CGPA of 8 and above)and is achieved by nearly forty percent of general category students, is rare and occurs once in many years among the reserved category students. It is not that all general category students do well. It is the hypocrisy ofthe highest order that on one hand the reservation for SC/STs isconsidered a success and quoted for extension to OBCs, and on theother hand, no hard data on the performance of these students is available in the public domain.

Normally this choice of careers by IIT graduates shouldbe a matter of satisfaction except that both these entries are againusing the reservation quota. Is it empowerment or crutches for life?In this whole episode, the most stunning news for me was when theHon'ble minister announced increase in intake to compensate for the reservations. This would amount to nearly 56% overall increase inundergraduate intake in the IITs. This showed complete ignorance ofwhat makes IIT undergraduate education tick.

For past few days I have been following the reservation discussion on internet, newspapers and television. Have been listening to the pro-reservation lobby remarks; politicans are just making mockery of whatever good exists in this country. This Sometimes makes me doubt about my indianness. Is this the country I feel so proud of? I want to see my country being one of the best nations in the world - and will this caste politics lead us anywhere?

I am not against reservations, India needs to bring economically weaker societies back into mainstream in order to seriously progress, but the way government is implementing the reservation policy is fundamentally wrong. Supreme court have gave a supporting hand to the agitating medicos in the begining thats was gud, But why is it not saying anything when the government is introducing that bill in the government.