Ekalavya gets into a B-School...

We continue with our Parable of Modern-Day Ekalavya...

Thanks to the recent Supreme Court judgement, Ekalavya had applied and got into a B-school through the "OBC quota" seats

...and immediately hit the glass ceiling described as "Criteria specified in Category VI" in the Supreme Court judgement!!

He could get the admission, because he had qualified, because he belonged to the "reserved" OBC category, and because he did not belong to the "creamy layer" criteria specified in the judgement.

His parents did not fall in the categories of Constitutional Posts, i.e.,

President of India

Vice-President of India

Judges of the Supreme Court and of the High Courts

Chairman and Members of UPSC and of the State Public Service Commission

Chief Election Commissioner

Comptroller and Auditor-General of India

Persons holding constitutional positions of similar nature as above

He was also not the progeny of those falling into the Service Category or the category of Armed Forces including Paramilitary Forces, i.e.,

Class I & II officers in Central or State services

Class I & II officers who may have expired or suffered permanent incapacitation, but had the benefit of employment in any International Organisation like UN, IMF, World bank, etc., for a period of not less than 5 years, prior to that.

Employees in Public Sector Undertakings

Officers holding equivalent or comparable posts in PSUs, Banks, Insurance Organisations, Universities, etc. (and also to equivalent or comparable posts and positions under private employment, pending the evaluation of the posts on equivalent or comparable basis in these institutions)

Persons who hold the rank of Colonel and above in the Army and to equivalent posts in the Navy and the Air Force and the Paramilitary Forces

In any case the above would not have qualified for reservations due to the "Criteria specified in Category VI"...
(yes, yes, I am coming to what this criteria is... Let there be some suspence to the story! ;0)

This "Criteria specified in Category VI", however, did apply to the sons and daughters of other categories.

For instance, it applied to sons and daughters of Professional Class and those engaged in Trade and Industry, e.g.,

Persons engaged in profession as a doctor, lawyer, chartered accountant, income tax consultant, financial or management consultant, dental surgeon, engineer, architect, computer specialist, film artists and other film professional, author, playwright, sports person, sports professional, media professional or any other vocations of like status

Persons engaged in trade, business and industry

...and it also applied to the progeny of the Property Owners, e.g.,

persons belonging to a family (father, mother and minor children) which owns only irrigated land which is equal to or more than 85% of the statutory ceiling area (which is 25 acres), etc.

owners of coffee, tea, rubber,mango,citrus, apples, etc., plantations

owners of vacant land and/or buildings in urban agglomerations
etc.

But, what was this "Criteria specified in Category VI"?

This was the final "Income/Wealth Test", meant to exclude the "creamy layer" - it excluded people coming from families with sufficient financial means. Based on the famous Indra Sawhney (Mandal) SC Judgement, this criteria excluded sons and daughters whose parents had an annual income of more than Rs 2.5lacs (Rs, 250,000).

Happily and fortunately, this criteria, which would have excluded him from admissions, did not apply to Ekalavya. He did not belong to the "creamy layer". His parents did not hold Constitutional Posts, or were in the Service Category. They were also not in the Professional Class, or engaged in Trade and Industry, with an annual income exceeding Rs 2.5lacs. And, of course, they owned no property, as described in the judgement.

But Ekalavya was crestfallen and dejected - actually shattered - when I met him.

"There is no way, I can get into this B-School," he told me.

"But why?", I asked him. "You have qualified, and you are not in the "creamy layer"."

"But where will I get the money to pay the fee?"

"What's the problem?", I said. "You can get education loan from a bank, can't you? Everyone says how simple education loans are nowadays. And you can pay that back once you get the job. Look at the average B-school salaries these days!"

"But do you know? The IIMs almost doubled up their fee just a week before the Judgement." he spat. "It is close to Rs 10lacs now... Other will follow soon, I am sure."

"How does that matter to you?", I could not comprehend. "What is Rs. 10lacs? You can get the education loan, and pay it back when you get the job. After all, your salary package will compensate for the fee hike."

"Yes, this is what everyone tells me. Once in the job, you can easily cover your costs." he said. "But you need money to get into, and through, a B-school, don't you?."

It was then that he shared the glass ceiling - or the Combo of B-school Fee Hike and India Banks' Association's Model Education Loan Scheme for Pursuing Higher Education in India, which is followed by all banks with minor modifications.

"Not being from the "creamy layer"", he said, "I need to take a loan of at least more than Rs 7.5lacs (The max recommended limit is Rs 10lacs) to pay the fee. I also need money to live and eat during those two years. But that loan requires as, the document says, "co-obligation of parents together with tangible collateral security of suitable value"."

tangible collateral security of suitable value!! What is that!!?

I read through the Model Education Loan Scheme about the collateral security. It read:
"The security can be in the form of land/ building/ Govt. securities/ Public Sector Bonds/Units of UTI, NSC, KVP, life policy, gold, shares/mutual fund units/debentures, bank deposit in the name of student/ parent/ guardian or any other third party with suitable margin."

Ekalavya glared at me. "Please tell me,", he challenged. "...all you who keep talking about "creamy layer". I am not the "creamy layer" and therefore, I am entitled to what you call "reservations". But also because I am not the "creamy layer", the banks would not give me loan to see me through my education."

No! I have no anwers for Ekalavya. Maybe only a solace that, OBC or not, - on the income criteria - more than 95% people in this country do no belong to the "creamy layer"!

"Alternative Perspective" on Reservations/ OBC/ Merit/ Quota/ Discrimination, etc

Today the Supreme Court gave the verdict upholding the 27% reservations for the OBCs in IITs, IIMs and other Central educational institutions but excluded the creamy layer (i.e., the children of constitutional functionaries including the President, judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts, members of the Union Public Service Commission, Groups A and B or Class I or II officers of the All-India Central and State services and children of public sector employees) from the benefit.

Just thought it appropriate to share the past 14-15 postings on:

Alternative Perspective on Reservation, meritocracy, OBC quota, etc.
(click to access)

To me, rightly or wrongly, this makes perfect sense... After all, you have to change the system to change the human dynamics in that system.

However, lest the "manufactured merit" churned out by the coaching centers feel that "their" rightful seats (due to the freak circumstances of their birth, and the coaching institutes) are being taken away from them, here is a clarification:

"In the 2007-08 budget, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram allocated Rs.26.98 billion for central educational institutions under the HRD ministry providing for 54 percent increase in the number of seats.

According to officials, in the budget for 2008-09 an allocation of about Rs.25.22 billion has been made for central universities - IITs, IIMs, NITs etc, for the purpose.

Following protests from various quarters, an Oversight Committee recommended a 54 percent expansion (over three years) in central educational institutions so that the number of general seats is not reduced."

The SC judgement vindicates what Michael Young - who coined the term Meritocracy - wrote in 2001 (I had quoted it earlier):

"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.

Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.

A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values.

With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams.... The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself."

Biharis, Muslims Need Not Apply...

In an earlier post - Ekalavya Applies for a Job!! - the issue was about Dalits and Muslims...

...and now, perhaps we need to add Biharis to the list of those discriminated... this time due to educated corporate India's obsession with "Proper English"...

Thanks to Yawar's mail, here are excerpts from the news-item in Mumbai Mirror

....Even the HR firm was surprised by the pre-condition set by the BPO. "Though we were surprised, the BPO organisation, Netambit, explained that people from UP and Bihar have a problem with their diction, especially with words like insurance where the ‘sh’ sound is pronounced as ‘s’," said Nadeem Faruqi, director, Connect Global, the HR firm. He was unable to get any logical explanation as to why Muslims were also excluded.

Uma, the HR head for Netambit, said, "We do not prefer people from UP and Bihar because of their strong mother tongue influence." However, she added that the HR firm was trying to malign them. "It is not at all true that we’ve said they are ineligible. In fact, we also do not prefer candidates from the North-East. Even they have a very strong mother tongue influence."

But Faruqi was firm. "Why should I want to malign them? For me, this is my business. We have been getting them candidates for the past three months. We have been verbally instructed that they don’t want candidates from UP and Bihar. They also do not want Muslims. I myself am a Muslim, but we didn’t probe much because for us this is business. They are our clients, they have specific needs, we service those needs," he said....

...Keith Rowe, director, HR Solutions, another consultancy, confirmed this. He said, "This kind of pre-conditioning exists in both big and small BPOs. We had many clients telling us categorically that they did not want candidates from a particular state, belonging to a particular caste or creed. In fact, this caste system works in another way in this sector. Looks and gender can also be qualifiers or disqualifiers. We also get requests for good looking girls because ‘they add to the glam quotient of the office environment’."

...Akhilesh Karn from Bihar, who used to work with GE Money in Gurgaon, had a tough time getting his last job. "Due to our accent, it is very difficult to get a job in a BPO. Because the managers know that we have a tough time getting jobs, at times, they even make us work longer shifts without any overtime," he said.

Coming back to unsolved riddle of "He was unable to get any logical explanation as to why Muslims were also excluded.... may be the reason is:

The "Other" in Modern Indian "Hindu" Psyche....

Caste-Discrimination: From Subliminal to Sublimated

Maybe we should have a taxonomy of caste-discrimination... I realised this when exposed to two very different expressions of caste discrimination through the news-items during last few days.

One instance was the stray news items which occupied much media attention - and headlines - in the past week about the ban on the Hindi film Aaja Nachlein UP - and Punjab and Haryana.

The reasons were these two lines in a song:

"mohalle mein kaisa maramar hai,
Bole mochi bhi khud ko sonar hai"
[roughly translated: what turmoil is happening in the community; even the cobbler claims to be a goldsmith]

Following a furore and the ban, these lines were removed from the song, and the Mayavati govt in UP lifted the ban... So did Punjab and Haryana (subsequently lifted). Depending where one is sociologically located, the furore was natural or exaggerated... But the indignation that some some/many felt was the implications hidden in these lyrics: that, if the mochi/cobbler (a Dalit/ untouchable occupation) tries to become like a sonar/goldsmith (who can be a schedule caste, a Devednya brahmin, or from the merchant class, sarraf, etc., but "above" the mochi in the caste hierarchy), this is a cause of social turmoil...

In any case, the director of the film, Anil Mehta, clarified:

"... We never meant any offense to anyone... When we were readying the lyrics, we had nothing derogatory in mind. If the idea had struck us, we would never have kept the line in the first place...If you look at the spirit of the film, it isn't about discrimination. It's about the participation of people from all walks of life."

Most likely - at least, I am sure - he was being genuinely honest. These lines were not intended to hurt anyone's sensibilites and sentiments... They did!

This is not the first time, I have experienced this subliminal force which blurs the boundaries between a conscious cultural expression and the unconscious discriminatory motif.

I recall that Kolkata airport used to have an open "smoking zone/area" in the arrival lounge. Some months back they shifted it to en enclosed "smoking section" (even that does not exist now). Needless to say, the enclosure for smokers was like a gas chamber - claustrophobic, with an exhaust fan that would not work, and hot and humid. I overheard one of the smokers grumbling:

"...we have no choice now. We have become schedule castes."

!!!

...which is both instructive and worth introspecting: about the innocuously subliminal nature of discrimination, about the innocent pervasiveness of caste-hierarchy (and barriers) in our popular imagery and language... about how it is so very easy for our conscious acts/words to get influenced by our historical-cultural programming... (which may go back to embedded childhood memories of being by friends and called a "bhangi" or a "chamaar", etc...

The other instance reflected the other end of continuum - conscious, blatent, and one which sublimated caste-discrimination into a socially acceptable "spiritual" value.

In a country, which banned "untouchability" in its constitution, and banned "manual scavenging" in 1993, the State Information Department of Gujarat publishes a book, written by the chief minister, Narendra Modi. Excerpts:

"Scavenging must have been a spiritual experience for the Valmiki caste... At some point in time somebody must have got enlightenment in scavenging. They must have thought that it is their duty to work for the happiness of the entire society and the Gods."

Or watch this video:

To a somewhat lesser extent, one finds similar motif of sublimation in this TV ad:



Behind such imageries and descriptions, however, lurks the living reality of the "Life Inside a Black Hole" (Tehelka Magazine, Issue 47(4), Dec 08, 2007), which can be too stark and unsettling for common human consciousness to live with - And thus, the attempts to mask it, discount it, trivialise it...

Excerpts from the article:

"What is the weather really like inside a manhole? What happens to the shit, piss and other waste flushed down by 18.02 percent of the billion- plus population?... At least 22,327 Dalits of a sub-community die doing sanitation work every year. Safai Kamgar Vikas Sangh, a body representing sanitation workers of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), sought data under the Right to Information Act in 2006, and found that 288 workers had died in 2004-05, 316 in 2003-04, and 320 in 2002-03, in just 14 of the 24 wards of the BMC. About 25 deaths every month. These figures do not include civic hospital workers, gutter cleaners or sanitation workers on contract....

...In Delhi, it is a humongous many-mouthed subterranean creature — a network of 5,600 km of sewers with about 1.5 lakh manholes,... which consumes 2,781 million litres of the sewage Delhi generates daily... It is indiscriminately fed a wide range of objects that causes clogs — condoms, sanitary pads, nondegradable thermocol, a variety of plastics, industrial sludge, kitchen waste, toilet cleaning acids, medical waste (syringes, blades, even placenta), glass shards, household gadgets, construction debris....

...Entering the narrow, dark drain, the worker pushes his only weapon, the khapchi — a spliced bamboo stick — to dislodge the block... It is then that a sudden blast of putrid sludge — besides methane, hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide — assaults the person. “Even if we manage not to swallow the toxic muck, it manages to enter our bodies.” Odourless and colourless, the carbon gases can cause suffocation. If the worker survives the initial ordeal, he crouches inside and loads the sludge into leaky metal buckets or wicker baskets for his team to haul out. Depending on the clog, the entire operation could take up to 48 hours. “We often work after midnight. When people sleep, the flow in the sew- ers is lesser, and our work does not disturb road-users,”...

...The CEC’s 2005 survey of 200 DJB manhole workers found that... 91.5 percent of them (were)from suffering injuries and 80 percent suffering eye infections. The survey found that diseases like leptospirosis, viral hepatitis and typhoid were common....

...Not surprisingly, most of the workers die before retirement. Owing to loss of appetite and inevitable alcoholism, many men shrink to half their size if they work 20 years. The average lifespan of a manhole worker is about 45. And if a worker does not die inside a manhole, the civic body does not offer any monetary compensation for illnesses/deaths owing to occupational hazards. In Delhi, permanent workers get a monthly “risk allowance” of Rs 50..."

The CEC (Center for Education and Communication) also reported that among those who worked in the manholes:

Few workers in age group 50-59; most die before retirement

35 percent illiteracy

Monthly wage for daily wagers Rs 2,950

More than 40 percent of workers are not permanent though more than 90 percent of them have been working for more than five years continuously

60 percent of workers enter manholes more than 10 times a month

Acute illnesses:
- eye irritation (79%),
- upper respiratory tract irritation (57%),
- difficulty in breathing (38%),
- skin rash (60.5%),
- cut and injury (91.5%).

Chronic illnesses:
- fatigue (76%),
- watering/burning of eyes (36%),
- cough (72.5%),
- skin irritation (41%),
- skin roughness (36%),
- skin rash (45.5%),
- lower backache (27%)

Hardly the life-conditions for "spiritual enlightenment" or experiencing the "yeh suhana mausam" (this lovely weather)!.... And if one wants to move out/up to the metaphorical state of a sonar, wouldn't that be natural?

Maybe that is why we need to map caste-based discrimination on a contunuum of Subliminal to Sublimated...

India: Between Hopes and Despair...

As individuals, we all go through our own internal contradictions between the reality and the aspirations - so, apparently does a country...

The following are some of the headlines I could pick up during last one month, showing the internal struggles/ contradictions of the contemporary India:

India’s GDP to cross trillion dollar mark in 07-08
Speaking at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Oslo on ‘India’s Socio Economic Agenda: Development with Democracy’, the Finance Minister P Chidambaram said that GDP at market prices has increased from US $20 billion in 1950-51 to US $912 billion in 2006-07 and is expected to cross the trillion dollar mark in the current year.... in terms of purchasing power parity, India’s GDP at US $4 trillion in 2006-07 accounted for 6.3 per cent of global GDP.

Global Hunger Index 2007: India ranks 94th in global list, trails behind China...
Despite averaging over 8.5% growth since 2000, India has achieved less than half of the United Nations Millennium Development Goal targets in hunger and is 94th on the Global Hunger Index of 118 countries, a report released by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) said.

Sensex hits 20,000
After a three-day hiatus, FIIs became net buyers on Monday at Rs 688 crore... The Sensex surged above 20,000 for the first time on Monday in tune with other Asian markets, as traders priced in another rate cut by the US Federal Reserve this week.

World Toilet Summit lays down sanitation as a human right
In 2007, 50 per cent (Indian) homes have access to a toilet.... Manual scavenging is banned in India but is still practised as large numbers of toilets, specially in semi-urban and rural areas, are not connected with sewage systems... An estimated 50,000 manual scavengers in India still clean toilets and toilet pits with their hands and carry the human excreta to dumping sites...

Mukesh Ambani is world's richest man
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani today became the richest person in the world, surpassing American software czar Bill Gates, Mexican business tycoon Carlos Slim Helu and famous investment guru Warren Buffett, courtesy the bull run in the stock market.

Caste and faith first in companies, merit next
Liberalisation and a free market economy have not changed traditional biases in companies.... A study conducted by American and Indian scholars... responded to 548 job advertisements in over 66 weeks and sent about 4,800 applications were sent.... The results were shocking: For every 100 upper-caste candidates who received calls for interviews, only 67 Dalit and 33 Muslim candidates were called. Upper-caste candidates who were not well qualified got better responses than Dalit applicants with higher degrees.

Tenth Fortune Global Forum begins in New Delhi
Top CEOs, head of states, academics and leading thinkers are gathering here to discuss the most pressing issues facing global business at the 10th Fortune Global Forum.... This year’s Forum is centered on ‘Mastering the Global Economy,’ a theme in which leaders will discuss the market realities that companies face in the midst of global integration... Speakers at the Forum include Prime Minister Manmohan Singh; Chairman and CEO of Time Warner, Richard D. Parsons; Finance Minister P. Chidambaram; Chairman of Wipro Ltd, Azim H. Premji; Chairman and CEO of The Goldman Sachs Group, Lloyd Blankfein; Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, John Chambers and Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, U.S. Treasury Department.

Recovering the lost plot
While India saw unprecedented prosperity in the last 15 years, its foodgrain intake declined — millions more of its people now live in hunger.... A major source of the trouble in the countryside is the erosion of land rights. Traditional land rights of adivasis and small farmers are denied either in the name of development or through manipulations of the land mafia. More and more people are becoming landless.

India's high net worth population holds $350 billion in financial wealth
The number of 'high net worth individuals' (HNWIs) in India at the end of 2006, grew by 20.5 per cent to 100,000... HNWIs are people with net financial assets of at least $1 million, excluding their primary residence and consumables... Indian HNWIs held a combined $350 billion in financial assets at the end of 2006.

Farm-led growth strongest weapon against poverty
GDP growth originating in agriculture is at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as GDP growth originating outside agriculture, according to the World Development Report 2008, which focuses on ‘Agriculture for Development’. It suggests that South Asian countries, with about 60 per cent of their labour force employed in agriculture, should place importance on agricultural growth to reduce poverty as “the transition of people out of agriculture and rural areas is not keeping pace with the restructuring of economies away from agriculture”.

... or as,in a different context, TS Elliot wrote (The Hollow Men):

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow...

Ekalavya Applies for a Job!!

Let's suppose the modern-day Ekalavya is able to convince the Dronacharyas, manages to get into a decent educational institution, does well in his/her study (or as well as the modern-day Pandavas)...

Or alternatively, the Swaminomics' suggestion that "creating quality schools and colleges for dalits and tribals would be a far better form of affirmative action than job reservation in the private sector", gets implemented, and so Ekalavya goes through this special institution to prepare him/her to join the mainstream society with adequate "merit"...

...and then applies for a job!

Chances are that s/he will find that the world has still not changed - not for him/her.

These are the findings of a recent study, which was done by the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies (IIDS) and Princeton University:

"The researchers filed 4,808 applications for 548 jobs advertised in English newspapers over 66 weeks starting October 2005. Applications by equally-qualified males from higher upper castes, Dalits and Muslims were filed for each vacancy and the response from the corporate sector was shocking.

While all higher upper caste candidates were called for interviews for a particular job vacancy, only 67% Dalits and 33% Muslims were contacted."

The study, original paper published in The Economic & Political Weekly (Oct 13, 2007) mentions the methodology:

"The research staff prepared sets of three matched application letters and résumés (in English) for each type of job. These applications had identical educational qualifications and experience. All the résumés and cover letters presented strong applicants for the job opening: they had suitable degrees from reputable universities...

The only aspect of family background that was communicated in these applications was the applicant’s name, yet this was enough to generate a different pattern of responses to applications from Muslims and dalits, compared to high caste Hindu names. These were all highly-educated and appropriately qualified applicants attempting to enter the modern private sector, yet even in this sector, caste and religion proved influential in determining ones job chances...
These discriminatory outcomes occurred at the very first stage of the process that Indian university graduates go through to apply for a job...."

Another recent study by S Madheswaran and Paul Attwell - Cast Discrimination in Indian Urban Labour Market (Economic & Political Weekly, Oct 13 2007) - concluded:

"...(a) discrimination causes 15 per cent lower wages for SC/STs as compared to equally qualified others; (b) SC/ST workers are discriminated against both in the public and private sectors, but the discrimination effect is much larger in the private sector; (c) discrimination accounts for a large part of the gross earnings difference between the two social groups in the regular salaried urban labour market, with occupational discrimination – unequal access to jobs – being considerably more important than wage discrimination – unequal pay in the same job..."

So what is the future for Ekalavya?

Pretty bleak, actually! - because even in the unlikely scenario of enforced job reservations in private sector, Swaminomics recommends the tactics for "Getting Around Job Quota", e.g.,:

"Faced with job quotas, companies could stop outsourcing and resume in-house operations. They can hire dalits and tribals as sweepers, canteen workers, drivers, chowkidars and so on.... They can open holiday homes for officers in the hills, employing tribals. This will enable them to fulfil job quotas without affecting management or factory quality."

This, perhaps, also represents the distorted definition of Enlightened Self-Interest in a divided society.

Divided by "English"

It is pardoxical to write this post in English....

India consists of some 18-22 scheduled languages... A tower of Babel!

One of its strengths is also its "large English-Speaking" population (but then, in India everything is large due to its size and proportion... where else on the planet, will one call a population on 120mn people - twice the size of the population of many countries - a "minority")

But, the "large English-Speaking" population, actually consists of around just 30-40mn people (out of 1bn+)... These are the people who can read-write-speak "English". The others have there own version of "Hinglish", e.g.:

(Photo Credit: Unknown)

One of the assumptions one makes as an educated, urban Indian is that it is the size of the "large English-Speaking" population that gives India an economically competitive advantage over other countries in the world in this globalised world. It also leads to some other implicit assumptions, e.g.,

"good" education gets equated with English-education

English is seen as essential for higher studies in engineering, medicine, science, social science, management, etc.

knowledge of English becomes a symbol of sophistication, of being cultured, and even of intelligence (or as the term currently in vogue, of "merit")
Etc.

And as happens with deeply cherished and widely shared social assumptions, they get enacted in the "real" world, shape the social reality, and become a self-fulfilling prophesy - i.e.,

because
...teaching in higher education is done in English, selection tests are designed in English, job interviews are conducted in English, candidates get selected on the basis of their knowledge of English, etc.,
therefore
...more technical books are written/published in English, there is greater demand for learning in English (or more number of shops that teach "English speaking"), knowing and conversing in English becomes "smart", "cool", "in" etc...

It is in this context, Sankrant Sanu's post on the "The English Class System" is worth looking at (actually, recommended!)

The following two tables are from his post, and show that:

Rich countries are more likely to speak their native language:

...while the poor countries adapt their "colonial" language:

I don't think that, based on this data, one can generalise that speaking the language of one's past colonial rulers makes a country poor. However, the fascination with English (or the colonial language) among the poor (and mostly post-colonial) countries does explain the historical antecendents of the linguistic divide between the "haves" and the "have-nots" of these societies. As Samuel Huntington had noted:

"As the former colonies moved towards independence... promotion and use of indigenous languages... was one way for the nationalist elites to distinguish themselves from the Western colonialists and to define their own identity. Following independence, however, the elites of these societies needed to distinguish themselves from the common people of their societies. Fluency in English, French or another Western language did that. As a result, the elites of non-Western societies are often better able to communicate with Westerners and with each other than with people of their own societies..."

And so - among many other divisions - India also remain "divided by English"... There are "English-haves" and "English have-nots"...

... Or as, in an earlier post about Garima's story, I had quoted from an article by Barkha Dutt:

"...Garima’s story exposes India’s paradoxical relationship with the English language. Nobody in the world speaks English like us. We have our own idioms, our own words and our own accents.

We pretend to love our own English and brag about how it is India’s great selling point; the reason we dominate the global outsourcing business. But, of course, deep down we know that our English is not the English that the West really wants. And so, each time we talk to Britons or Americans, we subtly alter our diction and inflection. When we set up our call centres, we drop the subtlety entirely and start accent classes to teach our young people to abandon the speech patterns of our own society and to migrate to a virtual, linguistic, middle America, where they become impersonators of people they will never meet and never know.

But within India, we still treat our own English as the great social decider. We laugh at regional accents, smirk at those who make grammatical errors and feel most at home with those who talk like us. Everyone else belongs on the other side of the English divide. And as it turns out, the other side of the class and caste divide as well."

Manufacturing "Merit" - Part 2

It was in the context of "reservations" and "merit"... Some months back, one of my posts on this blog/newsletter "Manufacturing Merit" had mentioned:

"....to win in this Darwinian landscape, an entirely new industry has taken shape during last decade or so, which specialises in "Manufacturing Merit"...the "Coaching Institutes"...

...which help aspirants to "crack" the entrance tests for any of the premier engineering/business institutes - irrespective of their basic undestanding of the subject...

The post ended with my understanding of the scenario:

"From a purely socio-historical point of view, the coaching institutes, in a very short period of time, have revolutionised two major changes in the societal texture of India:

1. they have redefined and evangelised a new meaning of "merit", which is essentially based on the supply-demand gap of opportunities in the society, and

2. they have successfully created a small but vocal new "social class" which owns the "merit" (and its definition) in the society."

Thanks to Abi's post about Bashing the JEE of IIT today, I accessed the Outlook aticle "Coaching Factories Are Dumbing Down The IITs"

... and it was heartening to see that this manufactured "merit" is loosing its shine...

The article starts thus...

• Tata Steel MD, B. Muthuraman, an IIT Madras graduate, says IITs are now thriving on their "past reputation" and TISCO is "not likely to recruit" IIT graduates any longer
  
  
• Many IIT professors too find the present crop of students lacking in creativity, and the spirit of innovation and inquiry
  
  
• They blame the students' blinkered, robotic approach to their studies on the fact that a large majority are products of coaching factories.
  
  
• They call for reform of the joint engineering exam (JEE), and of the IIT curriculum as well, to develop the students' societal awareness, communication skills and knowledge of the humanities.
  
  The nearly 2.5 lakh students who wrote the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) a few days ago for the 4,600 seats across seven IITs were blissfully unaware of a simmering debate about the JEE system, the institutes' curriculum and their future employability. What has triggered the discussion within the fraternity is the concern expressed by two distinguished IIT alumni about the general decline in standards of excellence at the institutes in recent years. Their remarks have questioned the calibre of students who make it into the IITs by subjecting themselves to the killing rigours of coaching factories in places like Kota and Hyderabad. The alumni seemed to conclude that these products of coaching factories—who now form, according to Wikipedia, 95 per cent of students at IITs—had a blinkered approach to education, did not recognise new ideas and had lost the spirit of inquiry and innovation...

... which brings one back to the issue of "Merit" vs. "Reservations"...

or as this article so succintly puts it:

When excellence in the IITs today is more in the imagination than in reality, how could reservations further erode it?

I guess, it will make as much sense if one replaces "IITs" with "IIMs" and "JEE" with "CAT/XAT/MAT, etc."...

On Merit & Discrimination: Pygmalion in the Classroom

In 1960s, Robert Rosenthal, currently a Professor of Psychology at Univ of California, along with and Lenore Jacobson had conducted a series interesting experiments about what a teacher - and his/her beliefs, hopes, biases and prejudices - can do to a student.

The findings of their unsettling study finally got published as a book: The Pygmalion in the Classroom
...and have been replicated more than 350 times since then....

The experimental design was simple:

Randomly select a groups of students, and group of teachers. Tell the teachers that they are going to teach some of the brightest of the brains in the school.

The Result: The students out-performed their batch, even though they had no "real" differentiating "merit".

Rosenthal's studies were about the schools, so one issue that begged the questions:
does this apply to higher education?

Apparently, it does, as he shared the example of the juniors he teaches:

"I ask them to define a research problem, search the literature, design an experiment and come in with results all in one semester. Now nobody can do all that in one semester. I can't do that in one semester, but these are juniors: they don't know it can't be done; so they all do it. They do amazing things."

The reverse of this self-fulfilling prophesy was also true - i.e., if the teachers perceived students as below average, their perfomance was also below average...

Some other later studies also identified the reasons for such perceptions (which are quite relevant to contemporary Indian acadmic environment) for such perceptions - and therefore, lower performance among students:

Sex. Lower expectations are often held for older girls--particularly in scientific and technical areas-- because of sex role stereotyping.

Sociao-Economic Status. Teachers sometimes hold lower expectations of students from lower SES backgrounds.

Race/Ethnicity. Students from minority races or ethnic groups are sometimes viewed as less capable than Anglo students.

Type of School. Students from either inner city schools or rural schools are sometimes presumed to be less capable than students from suburban schools.

Appearance.The expense or style of students' clothes and students' grooming habits can influence teachers' expectations.

Oral Language Patterns. The presence of any nonstandard English speaking pattern can sometimes lead teachers to hold lower expectations.

Messiness/ Disorganisation. Students whose work areas or assignments are messy are sometimes perceived as having lower ability.

Readiness. Immaturity or lack of experience may be confused with learning ability, leading to inappropriately low expectations.

Halo Effect. Some teachers generalize from one characteristic a student may have, thereby making unfounded assumptions about the student's overall ability or behavior.

Seating Position. If students seat themselves at the sides or back of the classroom, some teachers perceive this as a sign of lower learning motivation and/or ability and treat students accordingly.

Negative Comments about Students. Teachers' expectations are sometimes influenced by the negative comments of other staff members.

Outdated Theories. Educational theories which stress the limitations of learners can lead to lowered expectations.

Tracking or Long-Term Ability Groups. Placement in "low" tracks or groups can cause students to be viewed as having less learning potential than they actually have.

Rosenthal's book ends with a quote from GB Shaw's play "Pygmalion":

..."You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will."

...perhaps - as the so-called "issues" of reservations, quota and merit, etc. become increasingly a reality in India - Rosenthal's studies put the issue/choice in a nutshell:

It all depends on....
How do you treat Eliza Doolittle?
... As a "lady" or as a "flower girl"?!!!

Sources:
Rosenthal Lecture
Expectations & Student Outcomes
Pygmalion In The Classroom
"Proper" English & Reservations-of-a-Different-Kind
Quota/Reservations: More ""Reserved" than Others

Our very own "indigenous apartheid"

This is a long overdue post... Ever since had I discovered this must-watch video "I am Dalit. How are You" on Shivam Vij's blog a month or two back.

("Right click/save" to download the .wmv file of this 11 minute 22mb clip)

Even though one was "aware"(?) of these 'facts', but its sheer rawness is numbing, and it is difficult not to choke... specially, the last two minutes...

Dalits - the Broken People - the Untouchables, the Outcastes, or the Harijans, as Gandhi called them. There are some 250mn of them in the world. Out of which 160mn live in India... Or one in every six Indian belongs to this "non-category"... "non-category" because they are not even part of the social classification...

According to an article in the National Geographic:

"Embedded in Indian culture for the past 1,500 years, the caste system follows a basic precept: All men are created unequal. The ranks in Hindu society come from a legend in which the main groupings, or varnas, emerge from a primordial being. From the mouth come the Brahmans — the priests and teachers. From the arms come the Kshatriyas — the rulers and soldiers. From the thighs come the Vaisyas — merchants and traders. From the feet come the Sudras — laborers. Each varna in turn contains hundreds of hereditary castes and subcastes with their own pecking orders.

A fifth group describes the people who are achuta, or untouchable. The primordial being does not claim them. Untouchables are outcasts—people considered too impure, too polluted, to rank as worthy beings... Untouchables are shunned, insulted, banned from temples and higher caste homes, made to eat and drink from separate utensils in public places, and, in extreme but not uncommon cases, are raped, burned, lynched, and gunned down."

And though the MSM did pick up the "Kherlanji Massacre" - though about a month after it had happened - the discrimination, violence, and exclusion has remained a part of the Indian society.

Incidences of killing, rape and violence, of course, stand out as isolated happenings. In some ways - or at least technically - they can be checked by the legal system.... The more frightening aspect of this phenomenon are its invisible and subliminal manifestations.

Here are some examples:

6 weeks after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake that killed about 30,000 people, the Human Rights Watch team visited the some of the most devastated areas. In all places it found that Dalits and upper-caste Hindus were living in separate relief camps.

After the Tsunami hit the Indian coast in December 2005, the Dalits and other lower class were shunted into their own camps, separated from the 'exclusive' camp of the more dominant community. Moreover, they even got discriminated in getting the relief aid, shelter, water, etc.

In the aftermath of a 2001 earthquake in Gujarat, relief agencies were forced to mark their supplies of blood with the caste of the person it came from, or else people would not use them.

A UN report reads: "Untouchability is still very alive, especially in the countryside and can be seen in the segregation of housing, the Dalits having to live at least 1/4 of a mile from the other inhabitants and are forbidden the access to the well which is the common source of water. Moreover, segregation also exists in schools, services and public places (hairdressers, shops, transports; in restaurants, the crockery is sometimes separated between that for Dalits and that for upper casts)."
etc...

Sources & Other Readings:

India's Hidden Apartheid

Even Govt divides survivors on caste, says it’s practical

Tsunami Opens Fault Lines in Old Caste System

Broken People, Broken Promises

Situation of the Dalits in India

India's Shame (Frontline Magazine)

"Proper" English & Reservations-of-a-Different-Kind

A couple of years back, an alumnus who had graduated more than 30 years back from the B-School where I teach, had shared a personal episode with me. After joining the institute, within first term he realised that he could not cope up with the place. This was not so much because of the academic pressures, but because all teaching was done in English, and he was not at all conversant in the language.

Deciding to call it quits, he went to the then dean, and told him about his decision. "But you can't leave just because you don't know English!!", the jesuit priest told him... and then spent next six months, daily two hours, teaching him English!

When I met him, he had already worked with some of the leading Indian and foreign corporates for a couple of decades, had raised a family of very mature children (I met them), had decided to branch out on his own, and was operating his business.

Why did I recall this incident today?

...Today, I chanced upon a report (tip: Uma's blog) about Garima, the 16-year old daughter of a Delhi police constable, who had topped her class X (in the government-aided DAV Dwarka) by securing 97.6% marks in the CBSE exams - and a perfect 100 in science. Belonging to one of the Delhi villages, when she applied to DPS Dwarka (New Delhi), she was not selcted.

According to the school principal: "This year, we had around 200 applications for 28 seats. In the admission process, the Board exam score is not ignored, neither is it the only criteria. We take in students on relative merit, on the basis of an entrance test, an interview, and the board exam marks."

Garima ranked 12th out of 80 students selected in the written test, and made it to the interview, where she failed to make the grades. DPS' explanation for rejecting her was: "The CBSE marks don't mean anything to us. We have certain criteria about the kind of children we want. She wasn't able to speak English properly and that was also a problem."

There were 9 other girls who got selected, though they had less marks in CBSE than Garima, but fitted the "kind of children" the school wanted.

Garima was lucky, since she got noticed by the media and appeared on NDTV debate. Barkha Dutt wrote about her: "...there was nothing about her spoken English that suggested that she would have been unable to keep pace with the syllabus. Yes, she spoke with a regional accent that some would consider insufficiently sophisticated. But there was no doubt that she could not only follow a complex argument, she could also make herself understood to any English speaker."

I think, and hope, that Garima's case is not generalisable across all schools and all people. There are some heart-warming exceptions too. For instance, there was this touching article on Sudama's Children in the recent issue of The Outlook, which featured the Delhi schools and childen from less-privileged backgounds who studied there... about their challenges and the support they got from their peers and school.

Neverthless, Garima's case does open up three issues to think about...

1. The Purpose of Our Elite Educational Institutions
Whether DPS - or IITs, NITs, IIMs, XLRI, etc. - the entry to all such institutions is based on criteria that select the "educatable" students. These are the one who meet the criteria - good "background", the "profile", "communication skills" (in "proper" English) - that will help them to do well at the exit stage (e.g., cracking the IIT, B-school entrance test, getting a "good" job, etc.). This 'exit performance', in turn, increases the equity and ranking of the institution, and will attract more of such people to the educational institution.

Needless to say, such institutions do add value by polishing the latent aptitudes of the students.

But do they really create value which contributes to society?...

...or to paraphrase Justice Chinnappa Reddy 1985 SC judgement:

is it greater value to sharpen the aptitude of "the children of the upper-classes who go to St. Paul's High School and St. Stephen's College, and who have perhaps been specially coached for the examination may secure 70, 80 or even 90 per cent of the marks"

or does one create new value by bringing those chidren into the mainstream of the society, who have "no books and magazines to read at home, no radio to listen, no TV to watch, no one to help him with his homework, whose parents are either illiterate or so ignorant and ill informed that he cannot even hope to seek their advice on any matter of importance."

[Barkha Dutt's article - The English Divide - articulates the other two issues much better, and so, I will take the liberty of quoting from her]

2. The "Meaning" of Merit in Our Society?
"Garima’s story is a metaphor for India’s twisted tryst with the future... For some months now, as the debate over reservation has raged, opponents of the quotas have made the same point again and again: we should be a society where merit matters. It’s a compelling argument... But what do the anti-quota street fighters have to say now? Here’s a girl who competed in the mainstream, her own DAV pitched against the trendier, richer, big names. But her merit was swallowed up by prejudice.

...and all because her English accent was not sufficiently sophisticated!!!

3. "English" as an Instrument of Social Divide?
This is an important aspect of our social divide, since in India - inspite of its much touted "large English speaking population", there are barely 20-40mn (out of 1bn), who can actually read, write and speak English (of course, we have our own form of "Hinglish" with the road-side dhabas advertising that they serve "snakes" (snacks) with "child bear" ;0)...

...and there is an "elitism" about speaking "proper" English - even though, our English acquires its own regional peculiarities across the country.

As Burkha Dutt, points out:

"...Garima’s story exposes India’s paradoxical relationship with the English language. Nobody in the world speaks English like us. We have our own idioms, our own words and our own accents.

We pretend to love our own English and brag about how it is India’s great selling point; the reason we dominate the global outsourcing business. But, of course, deep down we know that our English is not the English that the West really wants. And so, each time we talk to Britons or Americans, we subtly alter our diction and inflection. When we set up our call centres, we drop the subtlety entirely and start accent classes to teach our young people to abandon the speech patterns of our own society and to migrate to a virtual, linguistic, middle America, where they become impersonators of people they will never meet and never know.

But within India, we still treat our own English as the great social decider. We laugh at regional accents, smirk at those who make grammatical errors and feel most at home with those who talk like us. Everyone else belongs on the other side of the English divide. And as it turns out, the other side of the class and caste divide as well."

Sources:

Did you say merit?

DPS turns down CBSE topper

The English Divide

Sudama's Children

Schools shouldn't hold interviews after boards: CBSE chief

Meritocracy & the "Secession of the Successful"

This is a continuation of my previous post about Manufacturing "Merit"...

According to Wikipedia:
"Meritocracy is a system of government based on rule by ability (merit) rather than by wealth, race or other determinants of social position.... Meritocratic governments and organizations stress talent, formal education, and competence, rather than existing differences such as social class, ethnicity, or sex. In practice, research on social mobility indicates that all these supposedly neutral criteria favour the children of those who are already privileged in some way."...

The term "Meritocracy" was coined by a British sociologist Michael Young in his 1958 novel The Rise of Meritocracy. Ironically, Young had coined the term in a disparaging sense to describe an unstable society in which one's social place is determined one's IQ. In the novel, this social system led to wide disparities between the masses and the elites, who had become arrogant and disconnected from the public sphere... And ultimately, to social revolution in which the masses overthrew the elite

Much later, the Harvard Professor, Richard Reich, coined the term "Secession of the Successful" in a 1991 New York Time article to describe how the elite "become arrogant and disconnected from the public sphere"

In a recent HT article, Sagarika Ghose captured the meaning of "Secession of the Successful" quite graphically:

"the ‘successful’ tend to ‘secede’ from society as they get richer and more successful. That is, those who are successful tend to retreat into a totally private world. They use private electricity. They attend private schools and colleges. They live in private colonies, manned by private security guards. They socialise at private clubs, use only private transport and thus they cease to have any stake at all in the ‘public realm’ or in the public world."

Perhaps most insightful are these excerpts from Michael Young's 2001 The Guardian article about merit and meritocracy:

"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.

Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.

A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values.

With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams.... The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself."

Manufacturing "Merit"

These days in India, when "merit" and "social justice" have become an either/or issue, there is some merit in having a relook at how "merit" is defined - and created/manufactured - in our society.

Notwithstanding the criticism that the educational infrastructure did not grow in India since independence, the data gives an altogether different picture:

According to another report, the total number of medical colleges in India also grew from 30 to around 250 with an intake of just about 20,000 (India has about 0.6mn registered doctors for a population of more than a billion people!)

Inspite of such growth, however, two factors have impeded the positive impact of this growth in the educational infrastructure:

1. The population has grown faster, and the demographic profile of the country has changed in favour of a very large young and vibrant generation (India is one of the youngest country, with a median age of less than 25: *please see the postscript)... Every year, close to 40lac (4mn) students pass out +2 from the Indian pre-degree educational schools/colleges.

2. The quality of many professional institutes is much lacking. For instance, the more than 100 engineering colleges in Karnataka and 200+ in Tamil Nadu lack sufficient faculty and infrastructure, but demand exhorbitant fee. Similarly, of the close to 1,000 B-schools in the country, only around 50 are recognised by the AICTE, etc..

...And therefore, the demand for good-quality educational (and occupational) opportunities has fast out-stripped the available opportunities.

For instance:

This year (2006), around 3lac (0.3mn) students appeared in IIT-JEE for about 6,000 seats in IITs, IIT-BHU and ISM-Dhanbad. The 18 NITs put together have just around 7,000 seats. (The irony is that, as the table above shows, while there are almost 3.5lac seats available in Indian engineering institutions, the aspirants' target is only for the quality institutes, which cannot accommodate all of them. Thus, while the success rate for entrance in IITs/NITs is less than 2%, in many engineering colleges, the seats remain vacant).

The situation is similar in the "second-rung" engineering colleges. In 2004, about 3.75lac (0.375mn) students appeared for AIEEE, competing for about 9,000 seats across 117 engineering colleges across the country.

Similarly, in 2005, around 1.5lac (0.15mn) candidates appeared for CAT for the 6 IIMs (about 3,000 seats), and around 70-odd other B-schools. Just a few years back, in 1998, this figure was 87,000.

Aspiring for the medical and dental colleges, in 2004, about 1.7lac (0.17mn) students appeared for CBSE's All India Pre-Medical Test, competing for just about 1,600 seats in the top medical colleges

About 7,000 students compete for the 80 seats across all its 9 centres of the National Law School, one of the premium 5-years courses in Law.

This year, for XAT (XLRI's admission test, which is accepted by 30 other b-schools), around 30,000 students (of the total 60k who appeared for the test) applied for the 180 seats in XLRI, etc., etc....

In many ways, the working definition of "merit" in contemporay India is a function of this big supply-demand gap, where less than 2% aspirants to professional courses qualify to have "merit", i.e., get selected to their desired courses... and a mere difference of less than 0.01%ile in the admission test can change one's status from "merit" to "de-merit"

And so, to win in this Darwinian landscape, an entirely new industry has taken shape during last decade or so, which specialises in "Manufacturing Merit"...

...the "Coaching Institutes":

Some Snapshots
(1bn =1 crore):

The Coaching Institute industry is dominated by around 50 firms. This is fast growing industry with an annual turnover estimates that vary from Rs.3,000bn-Rs.12,000bn. (as an offside, the fast-food industry in India has a turnover of only Rs.500bn :0)

Among the pioneers of this industry was the Bansal's Coaching Classes in Kota, Rajasthan, which started in 1983. Kota, currently, has around around 130 coaching institutes with an estimated combined turnover of Rs.250-400bn. The cost of 10 months coaching at Kota can vary between Rs.60,000 to Rs.175,000.The students come from all over India, and according to one report in 2003, Kota produced 2/3rd of the IIT entrants.

Kakadeo, Kanpur hosts 75 engineering, 20 medical and 15 business management coaching institutes within a two kilometre radius.

Chennai-based Brilliant Tutorials which provides coaching for 17 different exams to 60,000 students. According to this list, 730 of its students qualified in the IIT-JEE entrance test in 2005.

According to Delhi-based FIIT-JEE, 2047 of its students got selected in the IIT-JEE 2006 (that's for a total 7,000 seats!!!)

Mumbai-based IMS Learning Resources, which has 66 centers across the country, and coaches 40,000 students in several common entrance exams including CAT, eight state level MBA entrance exams, GRE, GMAT, etc.

Delhi-based Career Launcher has a presence in 51 cities across India and the Middle East and offers career oriented training and entrance exam preparatory education to over 35,000 students.

Chennai-based Triumphant Institute of Management Education Pvt. Ltd (TIME) has 90 centres in 59 cities, and claims that more than 1200 of its students got selected in the 6 IIMs through CAT-2004.

Chennai-based Aspire Learning Company prepares 40,000 students for the IIT-JEE, ICSE, CBSE, Tamil Nadu state board and matriculation exams in 42 centres across south India and boasts a gross annual revenue of Rs.16 crore.

...the list goes on: Professional Tutorials, Sachdeva New PT College, Rau's Study Cirle for IAS, Delhi-based Akash Institute, Trichur-based PC Thomas Classes, Sahil Study Circle, Chanakya IAS Academy, Ascent Education, etc. etc....

[Note: Obviously, one needs to apply a "correction factor" to the claims of numbers by the coaching institutes;0)... Nevertheless, there is no denying that they play a critical role in creating "merit" in the current system.]

...and How do the Coaching Institutes manufacture "Merit"?

There is no doubt that they - at least the "good" ones - help polishing the potential/knowledge that the aspirant must already be possessing (in fact, a few coaching institutes have their own "entrance test" or criteria for admitting the candidates for coaching!)

Compared to the broad generalised coverage of +2 and other courses, however, the coaching institutes are more focused to make the aspirant succeed in the entrance exam. This has to be so, since in our given system, one's "merit" (or lack of it) is determined by a one-shot, one-day-cricket-match kind of entrance exams. One single wrong answer or one single missed question can bar one's entry into the domain of merit.

Therefore, besides other things, the Coaching institutes, also

maintain a database of the previous years' question papers,

analyse the trends of questions asked over years in the entrance exam, and prepare the candidates for the kind of questions that are likely to come that particular year,

since most entrance-exam papers have "negative marking" component, it is often more likely to score higher marks by not answering some questions than by answering them. The coaching institutes also guide the aspirants how to minimise risk of losing marks,

if the final admission involves interview and group discussion, the coaching institutes also prepare the candidate for these "skills" (e.g., improving one's "GK", how to introduce yourself, how to interact in a group, speak proper English, self-presentation, etc.).

in some isolated cases (like this one), the coaching institutes also help the candidate by procuring the "leaked" paper for the test... Etc.

In fact, these latter contributions of coaching institutes are often their USP/differentiating feature.

From a purely socio-historical point of view, the coaching institutes, in a very short period of time, have revolutionised two major changes in the societal texture of India:

1. they have redefined and evangelised a new meaning of "merit", which is essentially based on the supply-demand gap of opportunities in the society, and

2. they have successfully created a small but vocal new "social class" which owns the "merit" (and its definition) in the society.

*Post-Script June 4th,'06: I stand corrected on this claim about India becoming a "young country" in the recent years. Please see Dilip D'Souza's informative posting contradicting this myth.

The Merit of Reservations

Is there a merit in reservation?

In fact, as many comments on the previous posts allege, the benefits of reservations are supposed to have been cornered by the "creamy layer" or by those who don’t actually fit into the criteria of being "backward".

On the other hand, a nation cannot develop on a sustainable basis, unless certain radical reforms are implemented to tackle the issues of social disparity and unequal opportunities...

The arguments on both side (pro- and anti-reservations), however, are largely based on ideological and/or anecdotal evidence.

My own mental analogy has been like this: if you spray fertilizer in a field - real life not being 100% perfect - it will not only help some plants to grow and bloom, but will also kill some plants due to overdose, and it will also often facilitate the growth of the weeds for whom it was not meant...

But the effectiveness of the fertilizer is if the aggregate productivity of the field increases.

And so, in this current debate about the reservations, one of question begs the answer:

Is there any empirical evidence to show that quota has really helped?... And if they have not done so far in last 60 years, how can one be sure that they will do so now?

The Southern Four states (Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra) have had 50% or more reservations in higher and profession education for many decades - even before the Mandal Commission in late 70s.

If the distributive justice that the reservations aimed at really worked, then there should be some aggregate positive differences between the Southern and the Northern states.

In one of the earlier postings (pt.10), I had quoted how in Tamil Nadu (which has had 69% reservations since 1960s), in 2004, students belonging to the Backward Class (BC) or Most Backward Classes (MBC) quailified for 952 of the total 1,224 seats in 12 government medical colleges in the State (77.9 per cent), and the first first 14 ranks in the medical admissions went to BC/MBC students.


But, as one would point out, getting into a medical college through reservation, is very different than becoming a good doctor (or as someone cruelly commented: "would you leave your life in the hands of a SC/ST/OBC doctor who got into the profession through reservations?")

Following this line of enquiry, I stumbled upon this report on The Merits of Reservations. It is based on the data from the Planning Commission's National Human Development Report 2001:

As the table below shows, apparently, at an aggregate societal level, reservations in healthcare education have had a positive impact on the society:

Sources:

Merits of Reservation

Planning Commission's National Human Development Report, 2001

Southern Solitude

Reservations/Quota and the Meaning of "Merit"

Who are the OBCs?...

It is surprising - or perhaps not so, given the "uneducated literacy" in the country - that a large number of people on either side of the reservation debate have little idea about the definition of OBCs.

This results in, e.g., a false debate on whether the reservations should be based on "economic criteria" or "caste".

Most people don't know - or care to find out - that the very definition of OBCs, however, was/is not based on genetic heredity. Rather, it is based on multiple criteria which consider not just the social (or caste-based) deprivation, but also on educational and economic deprivation...


According to Mandal Commission:

The backward Castes/Classes were defined on the following 11 criteria:

A. SOCIAL

Castes/classes considered as socially backward by others.

Castes/classes which mainly depend on manual labour for their livelihood.

Castes/classes where the percentage of married women below 17 is 25% above the state average in rural areas and 10% in urban areas; and that of married men is 10% and 5% above the state average in rural and urban areas respectively.

Castes/classes where participation of females in work is at least 25% above the state average.

B. EDUCATIONAL

Castes/classes where the number of children in the age group of 5 to 15 years who never attended school is at least 25% above the state average.

Castes/classes where the rate of student drop-out in the age group of 5-15 years is at least 25% above the state average.

Castes/classes amongst whom the proportion of matriculates is at least 25% below the state average

C. ECONOMIC

Castes/classes where the average value of family assets is at least 25% below the state average.

Castes/classes where the number of families living in kachcha houses is at least 25 % above the state average.

Castes/classes where the source of drinking water is beyond half a kilometer for more than 50% of the households.

Castes/classes where the number of the house-holds having taken a consumption loan is at least 25% above the state average.


According to National Commission for Backward Classes:

The commission, after studying the criteria/indicators framed by the Mandal commission and the commissions set up in the past by different state Governments and other relevant materials, formulated the following guidelines for considering requests for inclusion in the list of Other Backward Classes:

A. SOCIAL
1. Castes and communities, generally considered as socially backward.

2.

Castes and communities, which mainly depend on agricultural and/or other manual labour for their livelihood and are lacking any significant resource base.

Castes and communities, which, for their livelihood, mainly depend on agricultural and/or other manual labour for wage and are lacking any significant base.

Castes and communities, the women of which, as a general practice, are for their family’s livelihood, engaged in agricultural and/or other manual labour, for wage.

Castes and communities, the children of which, as a general practice, are, for family’s livelihood or for supplementing family’s low income, mainly engaged in agricultural and/or manual labour.

Castes and communities, which in terms of caste system, are identified with traditional crafts or traditional or hereditary occupations considered to be lowly or undignified.

Castes and communities, which in terms of the caste system, are identified with tradtional or hereditary occupations considered to be ‘unclean’ or stigmatised.

Nomadic and semi-nomadic castes and communities.

Denotified or Vimukta Jati castes and communities

3. Castes and communities, having no representation or poor representation in the State Legislative Assembly and/or district-level Panchayati Raj institutions during the ten years preceding the date of the application
(The term “poor representation” may be taken to refer to a caste or community whose presence in the body is less than 25% of its proportion in the population.)

B. EDUCATIONAL
1. Castes and communities, whose literacy rate is at least 8% less than the State or district average.

2. Castes and communities of which the proportion of matriculates is at least 20% less than the State or district average.

3. Castes and communities, of which the proportion of graduates is at least 20% less than the State or district average.


C. ECONOMIC
1. Castes and communities, a significant proportion of whose members reside only in Kachha houses.

2. Castes and communities, the share of whose members in number of cases and in extent of agricultural lands surrendered under the Agricultural Land Ceiling Act of the State, is nil or significantly low.

3. Castes and communities, the share of whose members in State Government posts and services of Groups A & B/Classes I & II, is not equal to the population-equivalent proportion of the caste/community.

Moral of the Story:
Intellectual brilliance/moral superiority is not a substitute for ignorance of facts ;0)

Quota/Reservations: More ""Reserved" than Others

Suddenly, the "OBC reservations" has opened the Pandora's Box.

The popular view (among the urban middle-class educated people) is that "quota" is bad - and dilutes the "merit"...

Frankly, I also became aware of the various kinds of "quotas" that exist to access the "temples of higher education" in India across the states. Most have been accepted (er...why???) as a given - and, to my knowledge no candle march or hunger strike ever took place against these!!

...that is, till the "OBC quota" came up, and opened a Pandora's Box.... here is a list:

All India Quota

State Quota: varies upto 25%... that allows one to skip the all India "merit" criteria and get an admission due to domicile status. It is not very difficult to get the domicile certificate, really;0)

Management Quota: around 15%.... Govt/ SC has been trying to squash it, but it still does give one an opportunity to get into an un-aided private college - if one can pay the money!

NRI Quota: small in number but allows one to slip past the criteria of "merit" if some rich relative abroad can sponsor one's education

Sportsman Quota, Army Quota, etc.

The Quota Trophy, paradoxically, goes to AIIMS:

While the AIIMS medicos go on hunger photogenic strike against the "reservations" (what with celebrity endorsement from Nafisa Ali and Shiv Khera)... there is no mention that 25% seats in the AIIMS PG course are "reserved" for AIIMS graduates).

Just quoting from a news item in TOI:

"25% reservation that AIIMS graduates get in PG admission and the Supreme Court judgment of 2001 that declares the earlier system of 33% reservation for them bad in law...

The HC had found that "AIIMS students, who had secured as low as 14% or 19% or 22% in the (all-India) entrance examination got admission to PG courses while SC or ST candidates could not secure admission in their 15% or 7% quota in PG courses, in spite of having obtained marks far higher than the in-house candidates of the institute." HC had analysed admission data over five years.

The apex court also agreed with the HC that the "figure of 33% reservation for in-house candidates was statistically so arrived at as to secure 100% reservation for AIIMS students. There were about 40 AIIMS candidates. The PG seats being 120, 33% thereof worked out to be 40." That meant all 40 AIIMS graduates were assured of PG seats.

Merit here was clearly being sacrificed, the study showed...

....Twelve AIIMS candidates were selected even though they got less marks than the SC candidate who secured 60.33% marks. Similarly, 16 AIIMS students got admission to PG courses even though they got less marks than another ST student who got 62.16%.

Etc.

Reservations/Quotas and the "Meaning of Merit"

If you are reading this posting on the blog or on a mail, then perhaps 90% chances are that you are against the "reservations" on the ground that it dilutes the "merit".

This, perhaps, is less indicative of the popularity of the "merit-cause", and more of the the fact that the Indian blogger community/netizens represents a self-reinforcing socio-politically isolated section on the other side of the digital divide.

In a democratic set-up, one is naturally entitled to have his/her own viewpoint... So this posting has nothing to do with being "for" or "against" the reservations... To each his own!

This posting is about some simple facts which somehow are never quoted/known in MSM - and about which few Indian bloggers ever bother to check/find-out...

...and to explore that if "merit" is the issue, then what does "merit" mean in the urban-centric visible India.

So if you happen to be one who is agitated and angered about the additional 27.5%reservations/quota in the "temples of higher education" (e.g., IITs, IIMs) - and how it dilutes the "merit"... Then please be honest - and answer in Yes/No

Did you know that...

1. The announcement by Minister for HRD, Arjun Singh, that "government is considering reservations in all educational institution" was based on the 104th Constitutional Amendment Bill, passed by the Lower House of Indian Parliament (Lok Sabha) on Dec 21st, 2005, by 379-to-1 votes (381 present, one abstained).
Yes / No?

2. It was also passed by the Rajya Sabha by 172-to-2 votes.
Yes / No?

3. The Bill was signed by the President of India, APJ Abdul Kalam, on Jan 20th, 2006 - thereby making it the 93rd Constitution Amendment Act, 2005, to be enacted upon by the incumbent government.
Yes / No?

4. There is no Mandal-I or II!!! (as projected by the media)... The proposal for this Amendment was based on Indian Consitution, and came from the recommendations of Mandal Commission - which was formed in 1978, during Janta Party regime, and submitted its report in 1978-79.
Yes / No?

5.According to findings of the Mandal Commission, in India there are (or were at that time) more than 3,000 OBC castes that constitute about 52% population of India (see the figures below)- these are in addition of 16% SCs and 8% STs. Together - SCs, STs & OBCs - constitute 76% of India's population.
.
Yes / No?

6. Besides the reservations, the Mandal Commission also recommended a number of other things - about which neither the media nor the "pro-merit" citizens are either aware, or willing to "protest" about, e.g.:
- radical alteration in production relations through progressive land reforms
- special educational facilities to upgrade the cultural environment of the students, with special emphasis on vocational training
- separate coaching facilities for students aspiring to enter technical and professional institutions
- creation of adequate facilities for improving the skills of village artisans
- subsidised loans for setting up small-scale industries
- the setting up of a separate chain of financial and technical bodies to assist OBC enterpreneurs.
- increasing the seats in institutes of higher education to accommodate the "reserved" candidates", etc...
Yes / No?

7. According to the Mandal Commision recommendations, the increase in reservations should be only along with the increase in the seats in the institute, i.e., the "reservations" should not have an adverse impact on regular non-reserved category. For instance, IIM-C and IIT-Kharagpur have already decided to increase the seatsYes / No?

8. Notwithstanding the claims that the increase in seats to accommodate the "reserved" candidates, requires enhancement of educational infrastructure (hostels, faculty) - which it is claimed will strech the capabilities of the institutes and impact their "quality" - the professional institutes (IIMs, XLRI, IITs, etc.) have continued to increase their seats over last 4-5 years.
Yes / No?

9. Large number of Indian Institutes of higher education charge (or used to charge, till the Supreme clamped down) "capitation fee" - i.e., allowing a "quota" for those who can pay. Similarily, there are "reserved" seats for foreign nationals, who pay higher fee in $s, even if they don't meet the criteria of "merit".... But no protest/"candle-march" ever happened against this "dilution of merit".
Yes / No?

10. The four Southern States - Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra - have had around 50% (or more) reservations for last 2 to 4 decades in their institutes of higher educations (Tamil Nadu adapted 69% reservations even before Mandal Commission; Kerala had 50% reservations since 1970s, etc.). These reservations/quota cover some of the prestigious universities like Anna, Tiruchi, Bharthidasan, Osmania, etc. (This, apparently, has not diluted the "merit" coming out from these "temple of higher learning").
Yes / No?

11. In 2005, in Tamil Nadu (which has 69% reservations for BC and MBCs since 1960s), the first 14 ranks in the admissions to the 12 state government medical colleges, went to the OBCs... In fact, among the top 400, only 31 were from the "forward class", and the Backward and Most-Backward class students qualifed for 952 out of 1,224 seats (78%).
Yes / No?

13. In old times, the lower classes (shudras) were not allowed to enter the temples, and were even punished to hear the vedas?
Yes / No?

Now, just in case, one did not know these (or most of these) facts - even though one felt angered by the dilution/pollution of "merit" by the "reservations" - then there is a point to consider:

Does "merit" in modern educated urban India mean being totally oblivious and alienated from the current socio-political reality?... and remains confined to proactive action only under threats to "my job, my merit.... my lollipop!"?

Or, in other words:

Is the anti-reservations sentiment among the educated urban Indians merely a morally justifiable "rang-de-basanti" peg on which one can hang one's sulking tantrums about the loss of monopoly on the traditional turf?

POST-SCRIPT: May 27th, 2006:
I had never thought that this isolated posting on the "meaning of merit" will bring so many bouquets and brickbats;0) - thanks to all who visited and contributed ... And instead of responding in the comment section (see below), I thought it may be worth adding this postscript as a response.

So here goes...

In the present zeitgeist, it is so easy to fall into "for us"/"against us" kind of binary thinking. The issue, at least to me, is far more complex than yes/no kind of classroom quiz. That is why the statement: "this posting has nothing to do with being "for" or "against" the reservations...", and focus was on the unmentioned facts in the MSM (and, unfortunately, also in the popular blogosphere).

Unfortunately, there are still many pieces of mis-information floating around (as can be seen in the comments). And this post-script is just to further clarify (and to highlight the ignorance about facts in the public domain):

Contrary to popular belief/knowledge, the Mandal Commission's definition of OBC was based on 11 criteria, which covered Social, Educational and Economic discrimination. Thus, the debate about "caste-based" vs "economic criteria" is actually a non-issue!!

The National Commission for Backward Classes, which was established in 1993 after the Supreme Court judgement about the "Creamy Layer", also uses Social, Educational and Economic criteria to identify backward classes

While it is true that that the last caste-based census was held in 1931, the Mandal Commission (and before that, Kaka Kalelkar Commission, 1961), had based their recommendations on their own sample surveys - one may have disagrements about the sample survey methodology, but it is not true that these reocommendations were based on 1931 data!

The differences in the estimates of OBCs among different surveys (52% by Mandal Commission, 32% by NSSO, 29% by National Family & Health Survey, etc.) is not because one is more accurate than the other - but because each uses difference criteria to define OBCs.

I would agree that any policy (reservations, 'tatkal sewa' in railways, tax-concessions/breaks to certain sections in the society, etc.) would seem unfair if considered only in the context of isolated individual cases ("my job, my merit..."). The real critreia of "merit" lies in the ability to see it in larger context of a society and history.

Personally, I can't understand the issue about the "vote-bank politics";0) - In a democratic society, all decisions will be invariably "political" and influenced by the votes of the constituents. This would apply as much to the "reservation" issue, as well government's decision to invest in urban infrastructure, opening of FDI in different sectors, etc.... But I guess, interpretations differ depending one's own stakes.