Reservations...

I have recently been asking some of my friends about the methods employed to measure social backwardness. Specifically, methods for measuring social backwardness which do not take recourse to educational and economic indicators. My initial assumption was that it would not be possible to measure social backwardness without falling back onto educational and economic indicators.

The purpose of this assumption was to show that, if the assumption is held to be true, although social backwardness is claimed to be a factor in deciding candidates (i mean entire communities as candidates, not individuals) for availing reservations, what we are essentially doing is looking at the educational and economic factors within

the set of people chiefly determined by caste identity. But what cannot be denied is that education and economic indicators can be poor for some people irrespective of the caste identities. There is a real possibility that there are certain communities, which do not belong to the set of people under consideration for inclusion in the Scheduled Castes list or OBC list, whose educational and economic indicators are as bad as those of the scheduled castes or OBCs.

And therefore I would’ve argued that those communities who do not belong to the scheduled castes or OBCs and yet are no better than them when their education and economic indicators are compared, also need to be included in the fold of reservations. Isn’t it fair to enlarge the set of people in consideration for reservations to the extent of a universal set, which includes all those people whose education and economic indicators – the only parameters being assumed to be considered for determining backwardness – are as bad as the indicators of those people belonging the castes’ set?

However, certain methods were suggested which negated the aforementioned assumption. Social backwardness can indeed be measured by considering, among other things, access to public goods & services and occupational patterns, both of which do not solely rely either on economic indicators or on educational indicators. (Although in such cases one is required to look at social discrimination and social backwardness interchangeably. This leads to some more questions but for the sake of maintaining a direction to what I’m writing, I’ll avoid going into such questions here)

Access to public goods & services (and even private goods & services in case of basic amenities) such as drinking water sources, primary health centres, educational institutions, etc. maybe be deprived to certain sections of the populations owing to their geographic locations. A case can be made out, though this might not be true in every such instance, that such deprivation of access to public goods & services is through a deliberate design intended to deny the particular community access to these basic amenities. This can be measured.

In case of occupational patterns, empirical data of employment may be analysed and instances be identified where certain traditionally stigmatic occupations and low paying jobs are exclusively taken up by certain communities. And looking the other way round, instances may be identified where vast majorities of people belonging to particular communities aren’t able to acquire jobs which other communities acquire more often than not. This kind of a trend points to factors other than meritocracy at play, factors based on social identities.

In both the above cases, the people belonging to the above referred to communities may be considered to be in a state of backwardness for which social causes are key. And for such communities, reservations may be provided in education and employment to remedy the social backwardness, as they are indeed being provided with.

For me, this raises a dilemma. If we are providing reservations in education and employment to the socially backward, we are essentially looking at education and employment as the means of emancipation of the ‘backward’ peoples. Which means that education and employment are acknowledged as the tools for salvation, with salvation here being understood as escape from discrimination and ability to lead a measurably better life (or it may be simply understood as ‘advancement’, as mentioned in the Constitution itself). What cannot be denied is that there are people other than those belonging to the scheduled castes and OBCs who are ‘backward’. Such people also strive to lead vastly better lives. And if such people cannot access education and employment – which have been acknowledged as the tools to attain salvation – isn’t it only fair (and even logical) to provide them also with reservations, along with the people who are eligible for reservations in the current scheme of things, to get educated and employed, and ultimately enable their ‘advancement'?

All this leads to the moot question, why do we provide reservations? Whatever be the rationale, is it of such a nature that it precludes the provision of reservation for people other than those who are currently availing it? Is it to remedy the historical injustice done to people belonging to certain castes? Is it to bring them up to the pedestal of respectable social status? Or is it to simply help them lead better lives?

If we want to help the other backward sections of the population, do we have to stick to the same kind of positive discrimination (I’m using this phrase for the lack of a better alternative) given to the scheduled castes and OBCs – namely reservations in the educational institutions and reservations in employment opportunities? Aren’t welfare schemes providing subsidised food, electricity, education, health care in the nature of positive discrimination? Should we necessarily contest for the exact same kind of positive discrimination shown towards scheduled castes and OBCs to also be applied to the other backward sections of the population? I ask this not as a rhetorical question, with an opinionated answer already formed in my mind. I ask these questions as a genuine plea for answers.

P.S: Please do forgive any naivety and faults or blunders in what I have written. In my defence, any such instance is due to lack of proper understanding and insufficient knowledge on the subject rather than wilful ignorance.

P.P.S: I’m not writing this mail to oppose the reservation policy or to depict anyone in a negative light. My intentions in writing this mail are purely for the purpose of my own personal understanding of the subject and to learn from any inputs that may be provided. No mala fide intentions.