After weeks of insipid and simplistic commentary, the reservation debate is finally starting to kick up some interesting points, with the Hindustan Times looking into the relationship of college admittance and the attendance of elite public schools on Sunday and today running a comparison of alternative models for allocating university seats developed by Yogendra Yadav, Satish Deshpande and Purushottam Agrawal. (Link not available yet). Similarly, the HT has called for a new study of caste in India--the last was in 1931--to determine exactly what conditions prevail.
These are productive ways of looking at the problem, and a welcome substitute for the anti-reservations harangues that have taken up the edit pages of all the major dailies for weeks.
Another element that bears study: the South. In Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, reservations are already in place for more than 50% of the university seats and government jobs, a fact that infuriates many high-caste southerners. On the other hand, some say that the expansion of reservations in the South has successfully ensured the empowerment and upliftment of traditionally oppressed classes. What's the reality? Why does nobody in the North care to look into it? I guess the South really is another country, albeit a far more successful one.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
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4 comments:
my point of view is that reservation will not solve the problem the other ways that we can solve this problem are on my blog.
http://www.vidya-ngo.blogspot.com
nonsense...my friend, little knowledge is very dangerous. if you know except for "iyers and iyengards" everybody else in karnataka and tamilnadu are classified as OBC/SC/STs...it's like saying 30% seats are reserved for higher classes...there lies the fallacy of your argument...and how do you define success?? name one institude in tamilnadu which has grown to the likes of iit and rec trichy? anna university? balls...by the way am a passout from rec trichy.
Yes, examine TN. What a pathetic state of affairs there - why is it a success? Here's a personal factoid: In 1992, for the TN engineering enterance exam (DOTE), the score Forward Classes needed to score was 42. BCs/OBCs - 20. Do you think that is fair? Wanna guess how many FCs were stranded on 41??
Yes, there has been a historical injustice. Correcting it in one fell swoop is not the answer.
Do you think you would have gotten into college in the US if 40% of the seats were reserved for African Americans?
To base it on economics is the only way to do it right. The US got it right in that regard.
Dude... you grew up in the US. Living for an extended period of time in any city/region of India will frustrate the hell out of you and you'd start dreaming about how nice it would be to live someplace else (perhaps another region of India). I also suspect that you're surrounded by south Indians in Delhi who never tire of telling you how much better it used to be back home in Madras (yeah yeah I know... they changed the name to be more "pure").
If you think cast is a problem in the north, try asking some probing questions of your south Indian friends about the cast situation in the south.
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