Learning by experiment

Following the Supreme Court’s radical legislation on upholding 27 per cent reservations for OBCs in institutions of higher learning, the Indian Institutes of Technology have come up with a sensible plan to implement it over three years at 9 per cent each, staggering the process to scale up their infrastructure as well as increase seats by 13 per cent. To suddenly fling open the doors to a much larger volume of OBC aspirants, in keeping with the government’s policy of keeping intact the number of general seats in effect, could have caused the institutions to implode under the demands of expansion placed on them.

Inclusive higher education is a patent necessity in India, and it is vitally bound up with the logic of political influence. Aspirations that could once be addressed through government jobs now demand stakes in the new entrepreneurial India, and the only way to get a foothold is through quality education. It is not morally acceptable or even politically tenable to perpetuate a closed system that bars the historically disadvantaged castes from even competing on the same terms.

The IITS, of course, have great symbolic significance in India, the one thing we got right. So the IIT model of phased reservations could help formulate a precedent for other universities, as well as act as a testing ground to take on complex issues surrounding the policy, like the decision to exclude the creamy layer — the economically well-off subset of the socially oppressed castes. At the moment, applicants are required to declare their OBC/creamy layer status at the entrance exam level, and then these claims will be vetted the same way as for government jobs. So far the notion of the “creamy layer” has remained a philosophical debate, and it is unclear whether the evaluative lens used for government employment can be transferred to the matter of education. The IIT example could be a welcome opportunity to examine, during the phases of quota implementation, claims on either side of the creamy layer debate.