The argument in this article is complete bullshit. What job quota does is to force companies to hire people who may not match their expectations. The "expectation" is what the company decides. It could be an IIT degree or some one with the right skill. It is for the company to "measure" and decide. Why do you want a law to force a company to hire, for example, 10 people from X community, even if they do not meet that company's expectations.
The best approach as most people pointed out is to focus on providing better education to everybody. Equal opportunities will come automatically. Govenment should stop intervening in Private sector hiring and firing practices. It will be detrimental to the growth of Indian industry if they continue to dictate hiring and firing terms to the industry.
The kind of reservation practiced in India now is a guarantee to get entry into an institution irrespective of merit and qualifications. It takes away the competition. It kills the incentive to improve one's self and raise the overall bar. Sub-par individuals get all the benefits while top class individuals rot away because they were not of the right caste. If done in private sector, it will kill whatever remaining global competence Indian corporations have and we will back to dark Congress Socialist age. There is absolutely no justification for it. Better investment would be in providing educational or vocational assistance to poor people irrespective of caste.
I agree that real merit should be the criteria for jobs, but the author is merely too clever by half. While we ought to look beyond mere degrees, we cannot look at birth based criteria, which is what the stupid Kancha Iliah's and Udit Raj's of the world are looking for. That's not merit either.
Secondly, how does the author propose that companies look for "real merit". MBA college interviews usually consist of group discussions and long interviews besides mere degree information. Please suggest a better way to determine true merit.
With almost 50% reservations in colleges for the "target groups", and placements at the end, I'm sure companies are implicitly involved in affirmative action without consciously doing so. While the goal of reservations at the academic level may make some sense in providing equal opportuity for all (and this is again debatable), reservations in the pvt sector seems outright illogical.
Communities which are oppressed cannot come up on their own. It is imperative that affirmative action or reservation or something is provided to alleviate their problem. But an individual cannot assume he is what he is because he belongs to BC or any other community or due to he being oppressed. If we look at india's population, there are so many poor people in the so called FC community as well. So In order to come up with a proper reservation system or affirmative action, it has to be done through comparitive indexes by maintaining a database of wealth index among various communities. Ths wealth index should serve as a comparitive index on where a particular community stands and determine whether they require affirmative action/reserver or not. for eg., if let's say a particular BC community stands at a higher rate and another BC community stands at a lower rate than the FC index, then the first BC communitity doesn't require a reservation/affirmative action. Whether the 2nd BC community sure requires it. I think the government should effectively try to create a database of wealth (other things as well as necessary) to arrive at this reserver to be free and fair for all.
I do not agree with the author when he says " This is not because these people are full of "merit" (that is, having the right talents for managerial jobs) but because they have the financial means and the will to get into these career-enhancing institutions. ".. Well my family could afford the IIT education for me but I did not have enough brain to get into one. People who really get in are those who have real talent and those are the people,I believe, are the real talented lot.
Whichever way author want to put spins on.. Merit is the essence of who an individual is.(read it as it is).There is no more room for any quota's. The system as is being abused to extents.. Is the Author putting an argument to get ready to create a lobby bribe-babus of private sector now. In the first place, if the Quota was working in public sector, why the public/government sector are going divested to private parties. Why there isn't any quota on birth? Isn't that a serious concern for INDIA and shouldn't government be helping the underpriviledged with bills on birth control by quota??
Mr. Jagannathan, could you pls kindly elaborate why "only dalits cannot afford quality education" ? Open your eyes, this is year 2004 ,not 1947. 57 "independent years" of reservations were sufficient to uplift the so-called dalits or backward classes. Today there are only three classes - the rich, the middle class and the poor. Open your mind and accept the fact (which i am sure you also know) that many middle class and poor students from so called forward-classes are also unable to afford "costlier studies". I agree with your point that companies should recruit people based on their talents and not marks, but again I feel the need to wake you up coz this is 21st century and most of the businesses recruit people who "CAN" work and they donot recruit based on just marks. I agree corporations should invest in training people who cannot afford so called "quality education", but I don't see a need why they should train only "Dalits, OBCs, Muslims". There are forward-class people who fall under "the disadvantaged sections". People who use the terms like dalits, minorities etc even in this age are real big disgrace to the nation and they are the real hurdles for development - jai hind
1) He implies that the upper classes afford quality education which directly leads them to IIT's. Is this poor and rich stuff really caste based? Don't we see lot of poor FC's and rich dalits? Also not all rich people end up in IIT's and all poor people in grade-B colleges. 2) Academic excellence is the basis and simplest means of judging a person's ability. If a person scores 90 and another one 50, obviously you will go for 90. You don't want to waste your time trying to prove that the guy scoring 50 is not really bad.
Why can't you just consider the financial aspect irrespective of the caste if you want to bring up the poor?
Private companies oppose this reservation thing because they know for sure that the government policies will end them up in real trouble.
Actually there were quite a few "zero" year students in IITs (or at least when I went to IIT) who are trained by the institute for one year to give the entrance exam (JEE), a lot of them join the IITs but leave in 1-2 years because of bad performance. The ones who make it need to be applauded. Remember, IITs have their quota too, its just a lot of people leave after they get in. So saying that there is no investment is simply bogus, the author needs to do his homework.
