Reservation Was Never An Anti-Poverty Measure

The government has announced 10 percent reservation for EWS in higher education. What are the pros and cons? Will it stand judicial scrutiny?

- P.S.Krishnan

Every problem should have a solution appropriate to the problem, just as every disease must have a medication appropriate to the disease. If somebody has TB, you give drugs for that. If someone has vitamin shortage, you don’t give him medicine for TB. In the same way, reservation cannot solve poverty. Poverty is a different problem of a different dimension. It requires different measures, macro as well as micro- economic.

Finding the right solution

Governments have struggled with this problem, and rightly so. They have to find the right solutions for both unemployment and poverty. Both of these are related. So, for both of these, a different set of policy measures are required. It has to be borne in mind that the problem for which reservation was created was ‘denial of the access of education and avenues for upward and outward mobility, not merely for individuals but collectivises, classes consisting of castes’.

Reservation for economically weaker sections

Our constitution provides for Equality of Opportunity and bars discrimination against any citizens on grounds of caste, religion, place of birth etc. This inter alia means that out of 100 posts, every citizen should have access to every one of 100 posts. The Constitution provides that in order to make Equality of Opportunity real, some of these posts can be made available to those classes who have been, over the centuries, collectively deprived, namely, Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEdBCs). Only to this extent can the availability of every one of the 100 posts to every citizen of India be abridged.