Ravishankar Arunachalam, a former faculty at IIT Madras and social activist follows up his first article (see below) with more evidence of its success.

Part I: Mathematics of Reservations

Imagine that the government came up with a proposal to build a new world-class technology institution to provide quality education to all students. Imagine, too, that a debate rages on the viability of building such an institution – in terms of the costs involved, student quality, desired outcomes etc. Now, imagine that such a debate takes place with little reference to IITs or the role they have played in technical education. Outrageous, you would think ? Yet, something similar is happening in the reservation debate, both within and outside AID. The record of states which have implemented OBC reservations already is seldom brought up.

The case of Tamilnadu States like Tamilndu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have already implemented reservation for OBCs in educational institutions. I will restrict my references to Tamilnadu alone, since I do not know about the situation in other states. In Tamilnadu, the total reservation is 69%, the split up for which is given below for convenience.

Category Population (lakhs) % of Total %Reserved
Backward Classes 287 46.2% 30%
Most Backward Classes 129 20.7% 20%
Scheduled Classes 118 19% 18%
Scheduled Tribes 7 1.1% 1%

Others 80 13% -
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Total 621 100% 69%

BCs and MBCs of Tamilnadu are together equivalent to the "Other Backward Castes", as they are referred to in the rest of the country. The most obvious observation from the table above is that the percentage of reservations is only equal to or lower than the percentage of the group in the overall population. So the reservation system is only trying to bring about proportional representation in educational institutions. It does not result in a reverse-discrimination (which would mean BCs get more than their proportional share in order to right historical wrongs), as many people claim. FCs, who form the "others", still get the bulk of the 31% open-quota seats even though their population percentage is only 13%.

Overall, the experience with reservation has been very positive, and that is why there is wide-spread support for it in the state. The government health-care system in Tamilnadu is better than most other states, and one reason has been the quality doctors that the system produces, a factor attributed to reservations. Many of them also opt to serve in rural areas. Not surprisingly, the TN chapter of the Indian Medical Association supports quotas for the OBCs.

Now it is not difficult to see why the anti-reservation polemic does not refer to states like Tamilnadu with an OBC reservation record. It is because there are no instances of bridges cracking due to faulty design and patients dying due to incompetent doctors. These are often cited as the potential dangers due to reservations, either directly or more subtly as "quality will deteriorate". I am not saying that there are no problems with govt doctors or hospitals in TN, but these problems are present in other states too, and the overall quality is still better in Tamilnadu.

Who gets in and who doesn’t?
Of course, forward castes aren't happy with the situation, in spite of having a larger representation than their proportion in the population. The problem is that the total number of seats available is so low that most people are left out. But this is true of every single category, and not just FCs. Many of us, belonging to the forward castes, have a lot of friends who are "left out", and feel outraged that its due to reservations (though many
FC candidates score lower than even the reserved-category cut-off marks, and still blame reservations!). But the question to ask is: What about the lakhs of people from the MBCs and BCs who get left out ? There are thousands of farmers' daughters and weavers' sons who either are unable to get to high school, or even if they do, do not get adequate support from home and are unable to afford coaching classes. We seldom know them and do not encounter them in our day-to-day lives. Yet they are real students, who are not only unable to get into these seats, but do not even get the opportunity to compete on an even footing. Are we pre-supposing that these students are all devoid of merit? According to the math above, for every FC friend of ours, there are at least 5 BC/MBC students who were denied the opportunity to get a seat. Who speaks for them?

Economic criterion
Such examples immediately bring up the point that reservations haven’t resulted in what they intended to do. Again, experience in Tamilnadu points otherwise. There are any number of good students from backward castes who get into Anna university every year due to reservations, and excel in their careers.

In addition, there is already a provision for excluding the creamy layer of each caste from reservation (the list of conditions that exclude a person from enjoying OBC reservation benefits) so that only the needy get the benefits.

What about purely economic criteria, leaving out caste?

While that might work in an ideal caste-less society, we have to acknowledge that caste is still a huge factor governing societal relationships today. Those who think that "caste is not a factor in urban India anymore", need only look at the matrimonial columns of any popular newspaper.

The supreme court has also ruled that reservations based on purely economic conditions is unconstitutional. Besides, economic conditions can easily change over time, whereas caste does not offer any mobility. That is why, in spite of reservations, it takes a lot of time for real empowerment of the lower castes. And just because a caste is "considered" low, it won’t become an OBC.It has to satisfy several conditions to be included as socio-economically" backward , for example that the proportion of graduates is 20% lower than the state or local average ( complete list of guidelines The outrageous fact is that there still are clearly identifiable castes and sub-castes which fall in such categories, exposing the deep-rooted nature of our caste system.

Part II: The Success of Reservations
TN health care system
Quite a few had questioned the claim that the health care system in TN was better. (Just to recap, TN has 69% reservations, including those for OBCs, in educational institutions as well as jobs).We can start with the National Family Health Survey and its state-wise report. That the overall health indicators are better in TN is well known, as borne out by the stats.

But the survey looks not only at indices like birth rate and malnutrition, but also health-care delivery. The state-wise report confirms that TN performs better than average in these factors too, for example in percentage of women who have had neo-natal care. I am not saying this is due to government doctors and reservations. The effectiveness of the health care delivery system depends on administrators, support staff and many other factors (it is pertinent to mention that the 69% reservation is followed not only in admissions to medical colleges, but also in nursing schools as well as recruitment of govt staffs). Still, there are over 8000 government doctors in the various PHCs and government Hospitals of Tamilnadu and surely they do play a role.

In a very recent speech during the inauguration of the Public Health Foundation of India, the PM had the following to say : "From what I see, we face a major gap in human resources in health....While states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat may have acceptable standards, there are several states in the country which do not have even the minimum number of institutions to turn out support staff for health care...."

In addition, the media has also, on numerous occasions , covered the success of health care delivery system in TN.

Economic and creamy-layer criterion
The criterion specified in the webpage of the national backward classes commission is that used for job reservation. For the current issue, it is not yet clear if the same criterion will apply. Even for jobs, while the criterion is there, we don't know how effective its
implementation has been. The purpose of referencing it was to show that extensive thought has been given to the creamy layer criterion even earlier, which was completely missed in the debates. (fyi: the income limit has recently been raised from Rs.1 lakh to Rs.2.5 lakh, according to the annual report of the commission which can be downloaded from the website).

A note on reservations based on economic criterion - It is quite surprising that the advocates of economic criterion bring up the point only in retaliation to caste-based reservations, and not as a desired step in itself. When the Delhi govt. proposed 25% reservation for the poor in schools, again everyone was up in arms. Also, genuine economic-based reservation in proportion to population percentages would still leave the FCs with a very small number of seats. (i.e if 95% people have less than a lakh income per year, then 95% of seats are reserved for such people, and so on). Perhaps what people mean is a token "10% reservation" for economically backward, so as to shut the debate?

Burden of proof
Lastly, many people, when confronted with new information that the creamy layer criterion is already there, or with data on population and reservation percentages, don't even seem to bat an eye. Probably they are simply against reservation, period (though they may not say so). But there are those who are genuinely interested in debate, and want to be convinced about the effectiveness of reservation before it is implemented. If it is shown that "a large number of OBCs and dalits are still left out of the system", they say "reservation has not made any difference".

And if it is shown that many people have actually benefited from reservation system, the question is "then why do we need reservations?". The point is both statements can be true, and both conclusions invalid. It could just be that the initial gap is so bad that while reservations have been able to make some dent, they are still needed to make the system more equitable. One can go back and forth on this, and it depends on who has a larger share of the "burden of proof". We have to first note that status-quo is so blatantly unfair to many castes, and vested interests are determined to keep it so. In such a situation, asking for clear evidence without making alternative proposals, is a tacit support for status-quo.  Shouldn’t the burden of proof be on those who are against reservations to collect data where reservations have already been implemented, and make a case for why it is not desirable?

Dr. Ravishankar may be contacted at aDOTravishankarATgmailDOTcom