Income, not caste, must be determining factor
Say what you will about Hardik Patel, the fact is that this young man has forced everyone in the political system to think about the system of reservations. In the midst of all this, the Rajasthan State Assembly recently passed a resolution that now ensures that over two-thirds of all available seats are reserved. Interestingly, it has ensured that seats are now reserved for the economically backward students as well. And that is the crux of the problem. The Mandal Commission report had never suggested that reservations for socially backward classes becomes a permanent fixture in India, but the problem with entitlement politics is simply that to remove entitlement carries a massive political cost. A cost that several political parties are unwilling to pay, and of course, there are those politicians who have been beneficiaries of reservations themselves who will do anything in their power to ensure that entitlement stays. However, this is not to argue that reservations are a bad thing. India is a deeply unequal society and this was unfortunately something that was extremely deep-rooted. Even today, caste-based discrimination is a fact of life. However, it has been two and a half decades since reservations for scheduled castes and other backward castes came into force, and it appears that certain communities have taken greater advantage of the reservations than others. It is imperative, therefore, that the so-called ‘creamy layer' provisions that apply to other backward candidates also be made to apply to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates. Notwithstanding that, there should be a bar on second-generation applicants from taking advantage of reservations, particularly those of Class-I officers.
The deepest inequality in India is economic. And while reservations have indeed helped raise some out of poverty, a more targeted form of reservations that is rooted in economics is what is required rather than a simple caste based system. The fact is that the dividing line between judging a caste as ‘backward' or ‘forward' is often fuzzy, but income is easier to classify. One of the best examples of this is the Patidar community, which has some extremely successful pockets while other sections live in penury or on the edge of penury. Reservations have not solved another problem: Every year thousands of students make it through reservation into India's premier institutes, yet the rate of failure among several of these students is high. That is simply because many of these students have far lower qualifying scores than general category students and are clearly not up to the basic educational standards required to start courses. This includes the fact that several of these students do not understand functional English as a result of which these students fall far behind the mark. These problems will continue to exist once reservations are opened to the economically backward, yet if the poor have to lifted out of penury, maybe we do not have a choice.