Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Reservation

General Elections are due in four states of India and just before that the Govt. of India has decided to increase the percentage of reserved seats in institutions which are under central govt. This will include prestigious institutes even IITs & IIMs. I think Reserving 49% of seats in every discipline is a complete disgusting idea.
Suddenly raising percentage of reserved seats from 22% to 49.5% (plus seats reserved for foreign nationals) will left near 50% seats for general category. The competition to get into IITs will become more brutal now.
A lots of people group are coming forward to condemned this move saying that it will dilute the brand name of these prestigious institutes. Well yes it would. If diluting the brand is good for the country - especially for its poorer sections then I can favour that.
But I think that govt. have not bothered to argue how reserving seats in IITs would lift OBCs out of poverty. In order to even appear for the IIT entrance exams, you need to have completed 12 years of schooling. How many poor OBCs will get that far? Now what will happen that poor OBCs will continue to drop out of school to support their families. Middle class and upper middle class OBCs who have all the opportunities that every other middle class person in India has will get a back door entry into elite institutions. Since they won't have to go through the rigorous competition that everyone else has to go through, the quality of these elite institutions will suffer.
If the Govt had real interest in doing good for OBCs it would have created conditions to allow poor OBCs to get educated till the high school level. And then introduced this reservation to give them a leg up into elite institutions.

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