In the face of a government that consists of people who are either extremely (perhaps, foolishly) selfish, and therefore callous (like Arjun S., of interview-with-Karan-Thapar fame), or too weak-kneed and hapless (like Manmohan S.), it is quite useless to present reasonable arguments on achieving social justice through appropriate means. And then there are the Left parties, who reject reasonableness every single time, in every important issue, whether it is airport modernization or demerger of SEBs or pursuit of social justice. Idiocy of the highest order is visible in our Left parties (except, maybe, Buddhadeb B.).
Two people (in collaboration with others) have, however, thought of a means by which the goal of social justice can be achieved, or at least, pursued, without harming anyone's interests. Prof. Satish Deshpande and Yogendra Yadav resented their scheme in two parts in The Hindu (links: Part I, Part II). They recognize a few fundamental things about the objective and the problem before proceeding towards a solution. As with any such nationwide scheme in a country like India, there might be numerous operational difficulties with this scheme as well, but in principle, it looked quite easonable to me.
What is our objective? The Constitutional objective is to strive towards social justice. In my mind, what this means is basically equality of opportunity in every legitimate sphere of life. What are the problems that cause social injustice today? Is it just caste or community? No, as the authors rightly point out, there are multiple, overlapping sources of disadvantage to many of our countrymen (& women) today. Apart from caste, the region of domicile and gender are two other important sources of disadvantage.
The authors argue that some form of 'affirmative action' is indeed required to ensure the Constitutional objective of equality of opportunity. But they err in saying that one should not read purely vote-bank-ish reasons behind the government's quota move. By introducing a fixed quota for designated castes, and also not including any subtleties like the 'creamy layer', the government is definitely indulging in short-term, vote-bank politics.
Their scheme includes three major sources of disadvantage, as mentioned above, and assign 'disadvantage scores' to each person, with suitable weightages to each level of disadvantage on each of the three axes. In principle, this scheme seemed comprehensive enough to me. However, the operational problems here will be in terms of segmenting and combining castes and religious communities into categories, designating different states or regions to particular categories, etc. Politicians from each region will want to categorize their region as backward as possible, to get points for their constituents and hopefully, votes for themselves, and so will quibble about the parameters used for categorization. The authors also say that a specific national survey for collecting data to be utilised in the scheme would be a good idea. But then, how long will that take (including field data collection, collation and analysis)? At least as long as the Census, or the NSSO sample surveys? The government, on the other hand, would want to do something now, not at an uncertain time in the future, for their own selfish reasons. Sociological configurations change over time, and the authors have not considered, or not mentioned, how revisions to the weightages will occur over time to reflect such changes.
Next comes the question of combining merit score with disadvantage score to arrive at a single score for each person seeking admission to any educational institution. In the first part, the authors blast our concept of merit and the style of exams like the IIT-JEE. Then, in the second part, they dismiss the question of merit as 'less controversial' and leave it at that. But the question of how best to 'measure' merit and combine it with disadvantage scores remains.
So, the problems are many. But the authors have the germ of a good idea. At least, it's an idea based on reason. Perhaps, it will never be implemented precisely for that reason.
