a mARTIAN dIARY

Currently the Indian academia seems to be split into two camps – the pro-reservation junta or the anti-reservation junta. And as a person who is now confirmed of stepping back into the academic world in a few months, I move around people and places where this discussion happens in a very heated manner. As such I have been quizzed many time by both camps – are you with us or against us?

Few months ago my response would be “If I get my seat, I don’t care much about how the others get in” but then I realised that it was not me talking but the tension of being on 3 waiting lists and the prospect of a future so cloudy taking its toll on me. Now that its clear that, barring unforeseen circumstances, I will very much be spending the next two years of my life at Delhi University South Campus studying MBA(MS) from Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) Delhi, I have had time to reflect upon this issue more closely. Having been in both the camps at different times in my life, instead of justifying my current stand I would like to trace my relation with reservation.

My first tryst with reservation came when I was trying to get into first standard. Since my father was a transferable bank employee, it seemed a logical step for my family to try and get me into a “central” school or KV which followed a “central” syllabus so that changes in school would affect only the social-politic environment rather than the curriculum making the inevitable adjustment less difficult. You could say that I was at the “wrong end” of the reservation since I was neither a defence personnel’s ward nor a central govt employee’s ward, which constituted the first two levels of priority on the basis of which the admissions were granted in a KV. I was a level III person or in human understandable terms - “Ward of transferable employee under the state government”, which was pretty low considering that even that time KV’s usually used to get filled by the time the applications from the first two categories were done with. As luck would have it a new division started that year, the now notorious (in my mind and our batch-folklore for all the beating me and my friends got from the “D” people) “D” division. But anyway I was in the “C” division list and was able to get into KVCPT.

Thinking about its right now, even though it was reservation per say, it was a very logical system since it was in the order of people who were mostly likely to get transferred and in hindsight (and more importantly having got my seat ) , it does not make any sense for me to have any kind of grudge towards it.

My next recollect-able memory of reservation is from my 8th or 9th standard civics class where I learned that some constituencies are reserved for SC/ST. it is something that I believe that I don’t have enough knowledge to make a stand on right even now though I really hated the idea at that time, but it’s a memory none-the-less.

Then came the engineering entrance “nonsense”. ( I call it nonsense now because I find people attaching so much value to it that after having done engineering from one my the best colleges in my state, I still feel the hue and cry is a bit too much, ESPECIALLY for people to REPEAT year ( plz guys unless your would die for engineering and for you believe its your true calling, your time is better spent doing something else…something you like. This does not include repeating for the IIT’s cuz I don’t have enough input to take a stand on that yet)

This is the stage where it dawned upon me that if there are 100 seats in a college, I am eligible only for less that 50 seats and some people, who studied along with me, came to the same tuition class, got the same books, bunked the same classes (more or less); had a special inheritance to the seats. Looking at the sheer numbers (less than 300-400 good seats and more than 50k people writing) I was convinced that it was injustice and hence was a fierce anti reservation guy, ready to air my view anywhere with supreme conviction. But once I got into the college I drew solace from the fact that these people would not get any reservation at the placement time. But only time will tell me that these “Reserved” people walked away with some of the better paying jobs, for which I can hold no grudge as I felt they deserved it.

But during my four years, I interacted with many people including people who came thru reservation and one of my closest friends, Miss R, was the daughter of a daily wage labourer. She was the person from whom I and my best friend in class S used to copy all our notes from. She was in most of my practical lab groups owing to our close roll numbers and without her I don’t think I would have passed my engineering labs. (Special mention to Miss C &N who were the people who I am eternally indebted to, for proving me with the rest of the notes :P) I think she , Miss R, would be the first person to agree to the fact that she was not good in our class subject as some of us. But that did not deter her from working hard, and now after my engineering even though there are people who got in with a “merit” seat who haven’t cleared all their papers, she cleared all of them and is working in a good job earning for her family. I am not trying to say “ See she did it, other merit students didn’t do it…so reservation is justified” but what I am trying to question is a question whose answer that most people take for granted.

What is Merit?

Is it my marks in the different exams I have taken? Is it the percentile I get in a hugely random exam like CAT, which depends, much more than my liking, to the taker’s luck on that that day? Frankly to me that’s not merit, nor can I define merit. But of course one thing I accept is that we don’t have seats for everybody and hence some people need to be selected or in other words others need to be eliminated. So its more a process of elimination than selection and a good academic profile would mean that there are better chances of a person putting the opportunity to study at an IIM or an IIT or an FMS to better use, but we have to understand that the selection or elimination process is flawed, it is not ideal, but close enough to idea and close enough to practical for us to make do.

Now that’s one way to measure merit. But that’s not the only merit. In the case of Miss R, given the resources she had, her output efficiency was probably at least equal if not much better to many of us ours. Which means that she also, in this definition of merit “Deserves” the seat. Why I use the word “deserves” the seat is because I see lots of anti-reservation people say that “deserving” candidates are loosing seats. But to them the word deserving is a 1 dimensional word without any meaning beyond the percentile obtained in cat or marks obtained in IIT-JEE. I again point out, they are a good measure of merit, but they are not without flaws.

So if entrance exams are a practical approximation to selection and elimination so are reservations a practical approximation to social justice. Both are not without flaws, but close enough to the ideal to be implemented.

Having said that I do not say that reservation is the only solution or the main solution for social justice, on the contrary it is just a stop gap solution. The thing to be emphasised most in my opinion is primary education that is the mail solution to social justice in education. More should be done at the grass roots level, which will unfortunately take too much time for it to have relevance in a vote-bank dominated politics. But I guess that’s for NGO’s and similar organisations to take up. My previous company MindTree used to do some work in this area and is something other organisations can also cue up on. And reservation can be phased out, once primary level education standards are reached.

But also having quoted this example, it is only prudent that I let out another fact about my college. Some of the people who got in through reservation, where some of the richest guys in my college which does make a mockery of the system, but since I know that more than 1 deserving candidate got thru reservation, I think the system has worked. And the creamy layer, if implemented properly will go a long way in helping the system match the ideal curve.