Reservations in India – The Curse to Progress of The Nation

According to Hindu religion, one is divided into castes. The “highest” castes are the Brahmins, who did high end jobs like being teachers and priests, then came the Kshatriyas, the class who were warriors, they were considered second to the Brahmins. Then came the Vaishyas who did clerical jobs and then the lowest rung were the shudras or dalits, who did menial jobs like being sweepers, cleaners, toilet cleaning etc.

The dalits were considered to be utterly impure by the Brahmins. One refused to even touch a dalit. Through generations, this discrimination continued. Even with the coming of modern education, this discrimination did not stop at all. Finally, came the break when people like Dr. B.R. Ambedkar advocated for the rights of the Dalits. Even Mahatma Gandhi fought for their rights and called them “Harijan” or children of God. Yet, discrimination still continued.

After Independence in 1947, the scene changed. The leaders of India realised that they were a part of our society and everybody was to be treated with equal respect. So they decided that Dalits are to be given enough opportunity to education and jobs so that they could be uplifted. Hence, started thereservation system.

Dalits were classified into Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Other Backward Castes (OBC).

The reservation meant that in each university and college, a specific percentage of seats be alloted to the SC, ST and OBC’s. Same meant with the jobs in the governmental institutions.

The reservation system continued for a long time. However, This system now faced a lot of criticism.

The reservation system for the dalits meant advantages such as cheap education, confirmed seats and low percentage needed in order to get a seat. This turned out to be an outcry to normal open merit students.

They would toil and work so hard in order to get enough percentage to get into a good college only to find that his/her seat has been taken because of the reservation. What was more shocking was that a dalit, on recieving world class education and landing at a very good job is still considered backward. This was absurd. Due to such assurances to SC/ST candidates, they started slacking off work. They knew, that the doors to education and employment were open to them with pass marks.

This led to many new problems. Open caste candidates started issuing fake caste certificates in order to avail the benefits of an SC/ST/OBC candidate.

As time progressed, the system never changed.The new governments were so blind so as to notice that now backward caste candidates had now progressed very high. They refused to acknowledge the fact that there are open merit candidates who are poor and backward too.

With such a rather diluted standards of knowledge and education for the backward castes, we see that the productivity of the backward caste candidate is pretty low. They don’t actually have to compete as their jobs and futures are fixed.

This reservation was due to stop in the year 2010, which has now been extended.The question we need to ask the Government of India is “ARE YOU SO BLIND?”.

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Ashwath Komath

Haider Ajaz