REALITY CHECK FOR RESEVATION BASED ON ECONOMIC BASIS

In recent weeks, I have read in countless news articles and messages that the anti-reservation activists support reservation based only on economic status. Well let’s do a reality check

Poverty line can be defined as "The level of income below which one cannot afford to purchase all the resources one requires to live" ((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_line):

Data from various national and international organizations, about India’s poor population is readily available on the Internet. A quick search on Google puts about 30% (I found figures ranging from 27% to 35%) of Indian population below poverty line. So about 30% of Indian population doesn’t even have enough food, clothes and housing (forget about decent health care and other facilities). This 30% doesn't even include the 4th class employees and other low paid workers with regular jobs in India.

Since the protests are to stop the reservation in elite institutes, I find it entirely fair to classify as poor, all those who are at a **serious disadvantage** due to poverty, and so can't afford the following facilities which **majority (if not all)** of present students in elite institutes have afforded in their lives.

1. 12 years of study in good schools that have a library, playing areas, well qualified English speaking teachers, decent class rooms, opportunities to develop the personality, communication skills and self confidence.

2. An atmosphere at home that encourages to study, parents who are educated and help you to study, a decent room with a desk, enough money to buy books and magazines (I could have included much more like video games, computers, and other goodies but let's keep it to bare minimum)

3.Access to quality coaching institutes like the Brilliants Tutorials etc.

We don't need a survey to say that 50% (a very conservative estimate including the 30% below poverty line) of Indian population would fall into the category of poor based upon the above criteria. A small percentage of this population would probably be brilliant enough to perform great without any help, but it would be fair to say that most of them would need a level playing ground to compete with rest of the relatively well off Indians to gain admission in the elite educational institutions.

Lots of people say that instead of reservation, the government should provide educational and other facilities to give a boost to the poor. Considering the present state of governance in India, I think it would be naïve to say that government can provide (and guarantee) the above-mentioned highly expensive facilities to the kids of more than **half a billion** people in India? It is just not possible.

So one of the other alternatives is to give reservation to the poor, so that they can compete and come up. And this is exactly what I'm hearing over and over again these days "reservation should be on economic basis, reservation should be given to the poor irrespective of the caste, etc".

SO I WANT TO KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE,AMONG THOSE PROTESTING AGAINST RESERVATION IN NEW DELHI, WOULD TRULY STAND BEHIND THE GOVERNMENT IF IT DECIDES TO ABOLISH ALL CASTE BASED RESERVATION AND TO GIVE 50% RESERVATION TO THE POOR IN ALL PROFESSIONAL COLLEGES OF INDIA?

Don’t forget that a vast majority of those falling under the 50% reservation for the poor would be the same people for whom the reservation exists in the present form. Some of those poor would be from the upper castes, but expect **most** of them to still be the SC/ST/OBCs who everybody is labeling as uncultured, incompetent and worthless people.

Please give your honest opinions.

HAS RESERVATION WORKED FOR DALITS IN INDIA ?

(A Note from the trenches)

It seems totally absurd to me that the upper caste anti-reservation lobby is
stating that the reservation system has not worked in the Indian society. Why I find it absurd? Well, how would they know if the reservation system has worked for the dalits or not? Have they gone to the dalit community and asked if the reservation is working for them. Most anti-reservation comments are being made by people who have lived a rather comfortable life and have never ever had any first hand experience of the dalit life. Who has ever done a detailed study involving only the dalit community to find out,if their quality of life and their standing in the Indian society has improved in the last 60 years because of reservation? When has the media brought a bunch of dalit professionals on national TV and asked them if reservation has worked for them. People don’t hesitate to assert that the benefits of reservation have failed to reach the very poor of the dalit society, but how many of them have taken the trouble of going to villages and asking the poor dalits if benefits of reservation have trickled down to them ? It is like making comments about the pros and cons of a medicine without ever asking the patients who have taken it.

Who else but the dalit community has any right or the necessary qualification to comment on the benefits of reservation? Most anti-reservation people sitting in Delhi contend that reservation hasn't worked at all. Those people are totally ignorant of the experiences of the dalit community and so are not qualified to make such comments.

Now, do I have the results of any study that shows that reservation has made positive change in the life of dalits ? No I don't. But what I have is a first hand experience of the dalit life in India. I also have personal experiences of how reservation has made tremendous difference in the life of the dalits of my family and my village. While I would agree that not all poor dalits have so far been benefited from reservation, based on my personal experience, I can assert that it is totally baseless to say that the benefits of reservation have been confined to the so called creamy layer.

Take the example of Manoj Kumar (name changed to protect identity) from a poor village in the Jammu district in India. Why I know about him? He is my first cousin. His father is a poor dalit farmer. Manoj had to work in the fields to earn the bread for himself and his family, while attending the poor village school. Discrimination meted out to his family from the upper caste folks of the village was a daily experience of Manoj’s life. His school didn't have the resources like a library, playing areas etc. Heck, his school didn’t even have sufficient rooms and desks and half of the students sit on the ground in the open. It was impossible for him to go to a coaching institute to get training for entrance exams to professional colleges. Given these circumstances do you think Manoj could have competed with the students of the private schools in the city who have had every resource necessary to study and excel in life? Also he certainly could not have purchased a seat in one of the thousands of donation based private colleges in India. Is it unfair to give such dalit students the privilege of reservation so that they can go to a professional college and make a positive change in their live and the lives of their families? Thanks to reservation, Manoj graduated from a government engineering college as a computer engineer in the year 2000 and now works as a lecturer in an engineering college. Who has bothered to ask people like him if the benefits of reservation trickled down to them? Much more important than the individual achievement of Manoj is the fact that he is now in a position to help and guide other dalits from his community.

But the mainstream media never highlights such achievements. In recent times, while the media has published articles about the upper caste professionals who couldn't get a seat in a post-graduate course despite being meritorious candidates, nobody cares to publish anything about people like Manoj. No matter how much the media claims to be fair and balanced about the coverage of the reservation issue, I see a total bias against the dalit side of the story.

Manoj is not an exception; there are hundreds of examples, in my family and my village, of the dalits who have gained a footing in the hindu society because of reservation. If it were not for the reservation these people would never have been able to earn their self respect and self sufficiency. The limited luxury of private sector customer services, sprung up in recent years, is confined to the major metropolitans. Majority of Indians still have to attend the government schools, seek medical treatment in government hospitals, use the government banks, seek protection from the Indian police and justice from the Indian judicial system. Everybody knows that in India unless you have connections, it is a nightmare to get things done in the above mentioned government offices. All government office have traditionally been controlled by the upper caste folks. Earlier when we used to go to any of those government offices and agencies, upper caste people used to dismiss us, calling us chamars on our backs. The consistent message for dalits was (and still is) "Don't you dare forget your place". Upper caste people who were used to see the dalits relegated to the lower realms of the society did (and still do) whatever was in their powers to keep the dalits in their backward state of life. There used to be no dalit representation in the government offices, so we couldn’t turn to anybody for help.Today there are dalits working in all braches of the government and they sympathize with and help the dalits that are trying to come up. Dalit community was brutally oppressed for thousands of years. They have made tremendous progress in the last 60 years in India.The prejudiced media and the anti-reservation upper caste lobby totally fails to see and acknowledge those achievements. Gradually the dalit community is being strengthened and is rediscovering the self respect that was lost due to age old oppression. This is the reality that you never hear of in the media and this is how the reservation has worked.

Untouchable - A National Geographic Story

Discrimination against India's lowest Hindu castes is technically illegal. But try telling that to the 160 million Untouchables, who face violent reprisals if they forget their place.....

Full Story at Untouchable

Hype of support for economic basis for reservation

In countless anti-reservation articles and rants I have read that the anti-reservation activists support reservation based on economic status.

Call me a skeptic, but I seriously doubt the above mentioned assertion.

Tomorrow if the govt says that it would take the so called creamy layer of SC/ST/OBCs out of the reservation policy but the reservation would still be 50% as about 50% of Indian population lives in poverty, I seriously doubt if many people would support that measure.

Southern Solitude

Souther Solitude (Story on Outlook India)
The South, with a longer history of social justice, has been quiet on quotas
S.ANAND

Why is the South not protesting the proposed reservation in higher education? Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala have a longer history of social movements, reservation and caste reform with leaders like Periyar E.V. Ramasamy and Sreenarayana Guru. Forget anti-reservation agitation, Tamil Nadu witnessed protests against the Supreme Court verdict doing away with quota in self-financing professional institutions in August 2005.........

Read full story at the link provided above.

Lessons from USA

Another Perspective on Reservation

Meritocracy at AIIMS

Check this article published in Times of India.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1543278.cms

Striking AIIMS docs live in a glass house
Akshaya Mukul
[ Tuesday, May 23, 2006 01:55:32 amTIMES NEWS NETWORK ]

The HC had found that "AIIMS students, who had secured as low as 14% or 19% or 22% in the (all-India) entrance examination got admission to PG courses while SC or ST candidates could not secure admission in their 15% or 7% quota in PG courses, in spite of having obtained marks far higher than the in-house candidates of the institute." HC had analysed admission data over five years.........


Merit here was clearly being sacrificed, the study showed. For instance, in the January 1996 session, an AIIMS student with 46.167% marks - lowest for an AIIMS student that year - got PG admission.........

Full story at the link give above.

HYPE OF MERITOCRACY

Whenever upper caste people talk about reservation they say that the beneficiaries of reservation are totally devoid of any competence and are the cause of the downfall of India, but consider this:

1. For the last 60 years upper castes have had almost total control of the national politics. Vast majority of politicians in position of power have belonged to upper caste. Politicians who took out rath yatras and got thousands killed in the name of religion were all upper caste folks, those who led the killings of thousands of sikhs in delhi where all upper caste folks, those who led and covered the massacre of muslims in gujrat were primarily upper caste folks, everybody involved in tehelka scandal was upper caste, the leadership who gave away hundreds of thousands of acres of land to China and pakistan in the wars were upper caste (by the way the don't forget that defense minister who led the highly successful bangladesh war opertion was a dalit, Jagjivan Lal), all politicians involved in bofors scam were upper caste folks. And all these incidents are just a snapshot. Now tell me how can anybody say that upper caste people have been more competent than the beneficiaries of reservation. Have the dalit politicians like Mayawati been flawless ? absolutely not. But they are still a minority in India. You don't need a do an extensive survey to find that out.Get the names of the leaders of major political parties who have been in power for the last 60 years at the national level and a majority of them were not and are not SC/ST/OBCs. So can someone tell me how the meritorious upper caste politicians have performed any better ?

2.Till this date majority of judiciary positions in Higher/Lower Courts as well as the Supreme Court in India are held by upper caste folks. But there are millions of cases pending in those courts. It is a nightmare, to seek justice in India. So how can anybody claim that the upper caste folks have managed the judiciary any better than the beneficiaries of reservation?

4. Till this date majority of the leadership positions in police and other law and order agencies are occupied by upper caste folks. But hundreds of rapes, murders, abductions and other crimes occur every hour in India. And the crime conviction rate in India is less than 10%. People are afraid to seek help from police. So who can say that those upper caste officers have shown higher competence?

5.Give me the names or relevant data that shows that low caste doctors have hurt patients much more than the upper caste doctors. I can bet that if data were gathered, majority of doctors who do illegal abortions or those who have so far been leaving the instruments in patient's bellies would turn out to be upper caste people.

6. Everybody talks about how India is shining in the world. But public health care system in India is in shambles. Poor people are treated like dirt in government hospitals. Latest reports from UNAIDS show that India now has more people with AIDS than any other country (yes Sir, more than South Africa). Only 7% of estimated 5.7 million people infected with AIDS in India received the antiretroviral drug therapy in 2005. And who are the managers? Majority of them belong to meritorious upper castes. Who has ever pointed out a finger towards those upper caste folks during the anti-reservation demonstrations?

7.Upper caste folks manage all sports agencies. So where are the Olympic gold medals folks? Would some one tell me?

8.India was in total control of upper caste rulers when invaders like the mughals and the british came. If the upper castes where so competent then how come they always suffered defeat in the hands of such invaders.

9. Give me the data, which shows that the structures built by lower caste engineers were bad than those build by upper caste engineers.

10.There are more than one lakh capitation/donation fee seats in private professional colleges in India which are taken by people with money whereas there are only about 8000 seats over which current anti-reservation agitation is going on. What about those one lakh seats? Are those been filled on the basis of merit? Why are people not talking about those rich people who are availing 100% reservation in these donation based colleges generation after generation because they have so much money. And why has no one questioned the merit and competence of those students in the donation based private colleges.

So those pointing fingers at the dalits should first examine the big picture of how their own community has performed in the last 60 years.Nobody has any right to say that the beneficiaries of reservation are incompetent. Such statements are absolutely baseless. No matter what the anti-reservation lobby projects, it is an open truth that low caste professionals can not be blamed for the misery of the country.It is perfectly fine with me, if you protest against reservation, but don't blame the present beneficiaries of reservation for the poor state of affairs in the country.And I must mention that Castes were not a creation of "reservation" but it is only when thousands of years of supression made the life of dalits a living hell that a need for reservation was felt.

The media is controlled by the upper caste folks and is totally biased against the pro reservation voice. While everybody does hear about the upper caste candidates who couldn't get into post-graduate schools, nobody hears about the sons of cobblers who have become engineers and doctors because of reservation and are performing as good, if not better, than the upper caste people. And media never ever showcases such people, now do they?

Those who are anti-reservation, forget that their great grandfathers were able to walk with self respect and do business in the Indian society when the dalits were forced to live outside the villages and towns and when dalits were banned from every temple, school and business. And this discrimination is still alive and kicking. It takes generations to gain a footing in the society.Let the dalits gain a footing in the society for another couple of hundred years and then make comments about equality.