This is the talk of the country and I must say a subject that causes much anguish to me, looking at the direction India is moving on this front. I have my reservations against these 'reservations' which, at the ground level, are nothing but 'vested-interest-servations' if you will please pardon the usage. Also, I do not consider reservations as equivalent to 'inclusion' or 'affirmative action'. They are bigger and more meaningful terms and obviously do not imply reservation/quota system which I think is just a farce and which is certainly fraught with risks.
There is no effort on the part of the 'leaders of the nation' to sit and decide what they actually want to achieve, and whether this is the best way to be going about it. It is assumed that this is the only way, while it is clearly not so, but certainly this is a clear way to divide people and contribute in no small measure to brain drain.
Lots of Indians since Independence have been groomed on freebies in different ways and means and they just want the party to last forever, and the dancing to reach frenzied pace. The only problem with introducing freebies is that no one wants to work to achieve them any more. These freebies have been given without any indication of under what conditions they are being given, making those benefitting from it believe it is their birthright to have, as time passes by.
As I see it, the right way ahead (and the one that should have been taken in the first place) is to declare that everything will be done to level the playing field, but not bias the outcome by having red carpets for some people and damning others to cut-throat competition (with the risk of losing out to a lower performer who has a carpeted welcome) because of the consequent lack of space to get in, and follow that with action.
A look at who have profited by the 'arrangement' so far would reveal that even if we accept for argument's sake that reservation is the right way, the really needy people have not been able to avail of the benefit after nearly 60 years of having the system, and it is a shame on the country that people still perform inhuman jobs and reservation has done nothing for them. We have a case of certain proxy-needy-people-elements in the society tapping all the benefits and sapping the nation of progress - damn the question of whether they deserved the goodies in the first place. This I write not in a vacuum, but after seeing children of officers in government/private sector, who clearly dont deserve to avail of any such privilege compared to other deserving people (even in so called forward castes), merrily reaping the benefits.
The only way ahead is to ensure that everybody competes on a level field, and towards that if you need to give free education, reasonable monetary support through loans and what else have you, do that and let the competition be fair. Even if it is causes a big drain on the national resources it is a just cause and I dont mind paying my taxes for that. I feel that if a person who really wants to study is given these things, he* would naturally come up. If he is blaming other things even after getting these, he is misguided, is just missing the point, or is basically finding reasons to chicken out. The others who think this is a fun ride that they can enjoy will not come up anyway, but nothing much can be done about it except by themselves.
On the status-quo of reservations already being the ground reality, this is a deplorable situation, since there is ABSOLUTELY no mention/implementation of well defined exit criteria beyond which people can/should compete in the open, And mind you, there are a lot of them who have used this system but are simply too lazy/afraid to come out of and compete. It looks like they want to have a ball all through, hard work be damned. The only exit criterion as of now, is if a person with some sense of justice comes forward himself and competes openly, which is a rare exception (with probability figures comparable to that of a blue moon) There is no reason people should continue to be pampered like this, apart from vote bank politics.
Let us just hope that someday it dawns on the policy makers that they have been taking the nation on the forbidden path that leads nowhere, and the road not taken was the right one to start with, way back in the independence era...
Postscript:
I just remembered the major reason people hold forward is the lack of quality in the government schools and the consequent inability to compete. Now, it is obvious that we have been trying to suppress the symptom rather than the problem here through reservation - a REALLY REALLY bad idea - ask the people who write software about this - the problem to address and solve is the quality of education in rural areas. Giving everyone from rural areas a 'zero correction' as it were is just trying to suppress the symptom and not address the issue at hand. Moreover, this is not a caste issue really, whereas mostly, reservation is caste based. They are just trying to equate these two, and trying to find support for even caste-based reservation, with such fallible lines of reasoning like
"we need rural reservation because quality of education is poor there"
=>
"we need reservations" (which I have above refuted)
=>
"reservations are good"
=>
"we need caste-based reservations, which must also therefore be good"
* Just a digression - esp to feminists out there: Let me just ask that 'he' be taken to mean 'he/she'. This is just to avoid cluttering. My view of this is that when I write I say 'he' and when a woman writes let her say 'she'. I think that is simple and elegant.
