Sunday, April 23, 2006

Reservations:II

Well I thought about the resrvations policy yesterday. I guess I was wrong. Reservations should be there. Infact I would say that there should be 70% reservations in all govt. services, educational institutes and pvt sector jobs. But somehow ppl are not able to comprehend the vitality and benefits of reservations.

Well certainly the political class in India have such foresight to take this important decision. But I think they still need to do more to silence their critics. They must practise what they preach. And the oppurtunity is been given to BJP to hammer this point. Remember BJP was the supporting party of VP Singh that brought in the policy of OBC reservations.VP Singh the most erudite and socially just PM of India ever.

Now Pramod Mahajan is fighting with death after being shot at by his brother. BJP should express its solidarity with lower castes by asking a SC/ST category doctor to operate on Mahajan. Damn the critics who harp on meritocracy. Meritocracy is just a fancy buzzword for the high castes. A doctor is a doctor afterall. And there is no difference between a General Category and Reserved category doctor.

So I request the BJP party to please show its concern for the disadvantaged and its support to the reservation policy. Maybe the President should intervene in this regard and make it mandatory for MPs and MLAs to be operated only by SC/ST doctors. Now along with the reservation bill this bill should also be introduced in Parliament.

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10 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

There is a saying that: Even if you bathe a dog and bring it to the middle of the house, it will go back and eat what it normally does! I guess education even at IIT and IIM has not changed the way you think. Why don't you for a change stop seeing everything from your caste/shitty mentality? Mahajan for one is no upper caste crusader. His brother-in-law Gopinath Munde (former deputy CM of Maharahstra) belongs to a so called backward caste. (No he didn't marry Mahajan's sister in a high profile political wedding but when both he and Mahajan were still non-entities in Politics)

Balaji.

10:43 AM  
Blogger Vaibhav said...

So talking about equality for all is vewing everything in caste/shitty mentality. Equality is shitty for you?

I respect Mahajan to form relationship with Munde. But again I am not against low castes or anything like that. And if ever I do fall in love with a girl, I would never bother about her caste.
My crusade is only against inequality ie. reservations. I feel there is no difference at all between different castes or different ppl and hence reservations should be abolished tooth and nail.

9:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There are two kinds of equality. Equality of means and equality of end . Reservation in educational institutions allows for equality of means . They are a means by which the underpriveleged can think of a life of dignity.Education is a means of learning to fish so that the person can fish for a lifetime .IIT and IIM are government funded institutes. It is the Government's job to bring the ordinary man in the mainstream.
You seem to be saying a OBC or BC person who passess IIT or IIM has no merit . How can someone who has passed the same exam be considered as having no merit? If indeed they have no merit then why worry? They will be no threat to you!! But you are seriously worried. You realise in your heart of hearts that after the playing field is levelled these people will be a serious threat.
Instead with private funding why not set up private institutes of high calibre which will increase the number of seats available to all students . Or explore other means of increasing the number of students who have access to higher education . I am refering to education over internet,satellite.
Why fight over a small loaf of bread ? And why not direct one's energy to baking a bigger bread?

4:14 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think instead of targeting individual politicians we need to get done with this caste system, and we could look at US as an example. We need to get rid of caste in every social aspect of our life, marriage, jobs, education etc.
Reservation is just a mean of getting votes for politicians, nothing else.
A serious policy research on advantages of reservation for SC/ST will prove that its not benefiting even the people it is intended for.
From my experience at IIT, most of the SC/ST come from well to do families, as there are parents are IAS/ IPS etc thanks to reservation, and they are the only one who could afford to send their kids to Kota.
So reservation is no longer helping even the deprived clas, its just becoming a heriditary thing.
The only solution is to get rid of reservation and lift disadvantaged people through better education at primary/secondary school and then make them compete with general population for college seats/jobs.
This will give them incentive to work harder and get better. The whole incentive structure of reservation cannot be justified from economic analysis.

10:31 AM  
Blogger Vaibhav said...

@Anonymous: So a reserved category candidate passes exam. Do you mean getting 60 percentile in CAT(and getting admission to IIM) is passing CAT exam? And IIT/IIMs are by no means mainstream institutes. They are a centre of excellence with world class faculty and only the deserving shuld be admitted there.

Talking of threat, how can you say that reserving jobs in pvt sector is not a threat to meritorious students. If seats are not at all filled on the basis of merit then obviously I as a meritorious student but unfortunately born in higher caste need to be worried. And I am worried about future of my childeren and of this country, especially of those ppl who don't want to settle abroad but remain in their homeland(India).

IIT/IIM is more than just a loaf of bread. They are full cake. It is painful to see Government spend tax-payer's hard earned money in this way.

@ankur All your points are valid. But I am targeting a individual politicians because there is a report that when reservation bill was placed in Parliament there was no opposition at all. It was passed without any discussion in Parliament. Now if all the politicians are so much keen on affirmative action, they should begin it in their homes.

8:52 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You are saying a fully trained and qualified SC /ST doctors can’t operate but only a upper caste person can . Such deep seated prejudice itself makes reservation a neccessity . Reservation is a way to counter such blindness . You make the neccessity of reservations apparent by such writing .
You have this smug belief in the infallibilty of these entrance examination . You cannot predict “merit” on the basis of these tests !!!
Post training professional life is a much better indicator of merit.

You seem to have this smug belief in the Entrance examination systems . The world over….. the brighest have failed these .
Warren Buffet failed to get into Harward when he was young . But that did not stop him from becoming the second richest man on the globe.
Albert Einstein failed the entrance test for admission to the Federal Institute of Technology.
Two of the Nobel lauretes from India, Rabindranath Nath Tagore and Hargobind Khurana were never known for their academic grades — while Tagore never took an examination in his life, Khurana could not make it to a medical school/college.
Your idea of merit is severely limited to entrance exams .
Think of what I am about to say well……. whether you are employed in Indian company or foreign company you can rest assured you will be an employee of company directors who in likelihood have never made it through a competitive entrance examination and have inherited that position of director/owners. That position of owner/director is reserved !!! If you have no problems serving such persons and increasing his wealth…… you ought to have no problem sitting on the same bench with an SC/ST as a student or a employee.

8:35 AM  
Blogger Vaibhav said...

Could you please explain what "qualify" means? Does getting 60 percentile in CAT means qualifying? At no point am I distinguishing b/w high caste and low caste. I am only distinguishing b/w General category and Reserved Category candidate. And there is a vast difference b/w these 2 distinctions, sorry you mayn't understand them.

The best in the world may not have cleared the entrance exams and mayn't have studied in best institutes. But that is a different matter altogether. That way your whole point about reservations is invalid. If IIT/IIM don't matter in any way, then why is reservation at all being introduced there?

The thing is that IIT/IIM assume JEE/CAT to be a good criteria for selection. If we "assume" that they are a good criteria, then it is criminal to admit a 60 percentile person and leave 90 percentile one, just because of fortune of birth in a particular family.

Somehow I am perplexed. When you talk of equality you are labelled casteist. And when you talk of favourable treatment by birth you are labelled reformist. May rationality prevail someday in this country.

8:53 PM  
Blogger Vaibhav said...

And if you do not consider entrance exams important at all then why are you clamouring in favour of reservations in them? According to your logic it won't do any good for low castes.

8:56 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

“Qualified” doctor means someone who is recognised as a doctor by the University or the recognised medical council .
Even if you let anyone get into the medical institutions …if the demands of the medical college are high, people should fail the final examination .They will not get the degree.

So, when you ask "would you like to be operated by a doctor who got in through reservation", I must ask, "how did he get the degree?"

If they all went through the same course, and graduated, clearly they are all acceptable doctors, aren't they?

Hopefully, the doctor who got in without reservation does not operate based on his class XII education... which is what is decided the "merit" at entrance time.

People flock to OBC/SC/ST doctors as well . And that affects an upper caste doctor’s practice !! That’s what hurts you. And you would want to preserve this monopoly .

The issue is not of reservation . It is of deservation !! For too long people from certain castes have been claiming ceratin priviledges as a divine right .So what has been reserved for so long now needs to be dereserved !!
The CAT exam is based on the SAT exam in the USA . It has been proved beyond doubt that the SAT test is culturally biased . Blacks and hispanics do poorly at it year after year .
If you were to take the same CAT exam which you cleared in a language that you did not understand you would be at a disadvantage compared to someone who was schooled in that language . Not knowing that language does not mean you lack the capacity to clear that exam.
Approximately 25 % of CAT test is about English! Another 25 % is about English Comprehension!!!! There you are !!!! About 50 % so called aptitude test is a hoax for someone who is from a non-english speaking background .
This is how the CAT like the SAT is discriminatory .
See the full form of SAT …Scholastic Aptitude Test . The problem is aptitude testing is not so simple . There is no test on earth which can reliably tests aptitude .
Aptitude tests such as the SAT have a historical tie to the concept of innate mental abilities and the belief that such abilities can be defined and meaningfully measured. Neither notion has been supported by modern research. Few scientists who have considered these matters seriously would argue that aptitude tests such as the SAT provide a true measure of intellectual abilities.

It was found that people could be coached to better their scores at SAT . The name SAT …Scholastic Aptitude Test could not be correct . So under such valid criticism the name was changed to Scholastic Assessment Test, since a test that can be coached clearly did not measure inherent "scholastic aptitude", but was influenced largely by what the test subject had learned in school. Even the College Board which conducts the SAT has beaten a hasty retreat.This was a major theoretical retreat by the College Board conducting SAT, which had previously maintained that the test measured inherent aptitude and was free of bias.
About ten years back , however, even the redundancy of the term assessment test was recognized and the name was changed to the neutral, and non-descriptive, SAT. At the time, the College Board announced, "Please note that SAT is not an initialism. It does not stand for anything."
The framers of these SAT tests assumed that intelligence was a unitary inherited attribute, that it was not subject to change over a lifetime, and that it could be measured and individuals could be ranked and assigned their place in society accordingly. The SAT evolved from these questionable assumptions about human talent and potential.
More and more people are questioning the validity of SAT . In the past MENSA used to accept high SAT score individuals . For the past decade it has stopped accepting SAT scores .
The whole exercise of deciding merit based on CAT scores discriminates against those from lower socio-economic status.
CAT is a clever way to keep those from lower socio-economic strata away Institutes funded with tax payers money .
So your claim of “Merit” based on CAT scores is hollow and discriminatory .

9:28 AM  
Blogger United Students said...

we appreciate your effort and concern for the issue. Protests in Delhi are gathering momentum, but we would also like the 'fire' to spread throughout the nation.

United Students is a platform which can be used my all the youth of this nation to fight against the social eviIs like this reservation policy released by the government lately. US has already taken initiative and is organizing protests and adopting other means to make sure the rollback of this decision takes place asap.

First and foremost, we would request you to open up a United Students chapter (if you reside outside Delhi) asap so that you start organizing activities under this banner and make it more effective. To open up a chapter please contact Mr. Pankaj Gupta (09810017868) or email us. US Chapters are also being opened up in Bangalore, Pune and other places across the country.

Once an forum is established, it would facilitate better mobilization among students.we can communicate our thoughts to each other and amongst other chapters and start organizing events in a synchronous behaviour. We here in Delhi have planned a calender of events and we are planning to have a simultaneous press conference of different US chapters across the country. Our main motive of getting all students under the same banner is to prove to the govt. that students all across the country stand united, and we refuse to stand by this proposed decision.


best wishes

unitedstudents.india@gmail.com

8:53 AM  

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