i have reservations too

i am a second-generation school-goer and graduate. my father is an engineer who benefited from the reservation mechanism. i am not sure about my mother. both my parents have done their masters and both have been contemplating doing their doctorates. i can safely say i have had a privileged upbringing. i did all my schooling in AP. for the most part, i studied in two hindu missionary schools. i had a bitter one-month dose of the government schooling system too. the teachers tried their best. but there just wasn’t enough infrastructure. and i am only talking about the government school in itanagar, the state capital.

i was thought to be a good student at home. but when it was time to go to college, i didn’t know whether i stood on par with a student, say, from a good school in delhi, who had probably been getting educational advantages all of her life - not to mention the coaching classes she had been attending since ninth grade in preparation for entrance examinations. AP has a joint entrance examination where students compete for a few hundred seats that have been reserved for us at institutions throughout the country. i sat for that examination. i also worked up the courage to appear for the entrance examination of a very respected institute for architecture. of course, i was under-confident. so i registered as an ST candidate.

i got through to the architecture institute, and i was ranked 12th in the general category. meanwhile, i also got through easily to JIPMER and LHMC and many engineering colleges. my choice was easy. one, i wasn’t keen to be a doctor or an engineer. two, i didn’t want to be looked down upon as a quota student. when i went in to fill in my acceptance form for at the architecture institute, and the lady at the desk looked for my name under the ST category, it felt very good to tell her that she better look for it under the general category.

my take on reservation is therefore, retrospective and i can afford to be expansive. do we need reservation? yes, of course. in AP, less than twenty out of a hundred children get even a semblance of quality education. it doesn’t mean that of the rest, at least twenty others don’t have what it takes. i have a lot of friends who went to med schools and engineering schools on quota. they are good doctors and engineers today. on behalf of my friends, i take offence to insinuations that quota students turn out to be butchers. reservation gets you a place into an institution. once you are in, there is no concession and no reservation for passing examinations. on the other hand, i have heard of teachers who are so biased that they go the extra mile to discredit their merit and hard work and fail them out of spite.

there is the other aspect. most of the students who go from these regions come back home and serve the people here. a doctor born and brought up in Delhi has no obligation to come and do time in a godforsaken unelectrified village in the malaria-infested backwoods of AP. for him, it is perhaps more lucrative to go to the US or UK. but for a child from this village, there is a moral obligation and even motivation to come back and be of use to the community. by helping children from these areas to become doctors, one is investing in the healthcare system of the rural areas too.

i agree the quota system is vulnerable to misuse. again and again, children from the privileged sections of the scheduled tribes and castes take unfair advantage of this, and in the process, antagonize many people against the idea of reservation. but such misuse does not make the idea of affirmative action redundant, just like booth-capturing doesn’t nullify our democracy. instead of demanding that reservation be scrapped, we must insist that tighter checks and balances be put in place. let there be more stringent socio-economic specifications, plug the loop-holes and ensure that the wrong guys don’t profit.

even today, there is a general correlation between one’s community and/or region of birth and the degree of one’s educational deprivation. this of course is as true for a child who may be a brahmin by birth but from an economically weaker background. as i see it, reservation is a means of leveling the playing field. it is ridiculous to expect a first-generation educated child to compete with someone whose family tree is crowded with ancestors who went to london for higher studies.

and yes, there is a lot of work to be done on our school systems. but that’s another long story.

reservation does not have to be a sine die situation. but as long as inequalities exist, a humane society cannot deny its possibilities.