India's recurring reservations rumble

After a long spell on the back burner, the issue of 'reservations" (preferential or affirmative action quotas) are again a major topic in Indian politics. India's central government -- or more appropriately, the minister for Human Resource Development, Arjun Singh -- has announced that the government would like to implement reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in elite, central government sponsored educational institutions, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). These would be in addition to the existing reservations in educational institutions and government employment for the most marginalized social groups the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs).

The latest proposal has brought protests and condemnation not only from the urban middle and upper classes, but also, interestingly, from big business. Big business seems to have become interested as the result of a a speech by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in which he referred to the need for "socially and economically broadbased" employment to be part of the growth process. This has resulted in a flurry of protests from major private firms concerned that reservations in the private sector are next. Reservations in the private sector have, in fact been demanded by advocates of reaservations for a while but without the endorsement of the two leading national parties. But business groups are also condemining the proposed reservation in the IITs and IIMs as likely to dilute the meritocratic recruitment hat the they hold to be India's competitive edge. But business groups seem to be missing the real thrust of the prime minister's speech. His concern was even broader, for example that the current econmic model, driven by white collar jobs was not creating enough employment. Thus the prime minister excplicitly called for an expansion in manufacturing, not an area affected by the reservations in IIMs and IITs.

In many ways the debate over the IITs and IIMs and the private sector reflects the fact that the sources of elite status have shifted significantly since 1990, when the government of then prime minister V.P. Singh announced the introduction of reservations for the Other Backward Classes. Whereas even in the 1980s, access to government employment was the major avenue of upward mobility, since the liberalization of 1991, the private sector has been the major engine of growth. Indeed, it is likely that the threat of reservations made the middle class more amenable to liberalization. That the current proposal is made by a government headed by the architect of liberalization, the then finance minister Manmohan Singh, is viewed as a paradox, as the elite who benefited the most from liberalization are viewed as Manmohan Singh's constituency.

Meantime the debate over the merits of reservations proceeds along predictable lines. Supporters argue that quotas only open doors for members of disadvantaged communities who then have to make the most of these opportunities. Opponents argue that they sap inititiative and that those who really need it don't get reservations. So, for example, this piece by Surjit Singh Bhalla, a well-known pollster presents some fascinating figures on the rate of enrolment in college by high school graduates of different groups to argue that the group that really needs it reservations are Muslims. Bhalla's criteria for determining whether a group needs reservations, though, is based on the proportion of high school graduates proceeding to college -- largely the same among all groups -- rather then the proportion of college graduates in the group as a whole. This is a fascinating criterion that deserves further comment but will have to wait for another post. One point worth mentioning: as Bhalla correctly observes, the difference between the two is that members of less privileged groups are far less likely to have the opportunity to finish high school.

The argument that the truly needy do not get reservations is often accompanied by calls for broadening investment in education. Another well-known public figure, K.P.S. Gill, the police official credited with crushing the Punjab insurgency in the early 1990s, argues that the problem is the lack of investment in rural education. This is obviously worthwhile, but like liberalization not a call that is made with nearly as much passion when reservations is not an issue.

Many are predicting direly that Arjun Singh's -- and Manmohan Singh's? -- announcement will have the same results as V.P. Singh's announcement led to the fall of his minority coalition government -- supported by both the Hindu right and the communist left -- and the splintering of his own party into the many regional factions that still occupy a significant chunk of the parliament. This has not happened and seems unlikely. The Congress party's core vote base -- the rural poor --are neither threatened nor empowered by reservations, their lives are more likely to be affected by the nationwide employment guarantee program just launched by the government. The reservations issue is more about alliance building with those pesky regional fragmetns of the Janata Dal, and perhaps seeking to create an alternative to the ever problematic support of the Left Front which continues to veto the labor reforms that would generate growth in manufacturing.