It was Dr B. R. Ambedkar, in 1949, who said, “In politics, we will be recognizing the principle of one man, one vote and one vote, one value. In our social and economic life, we, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?”
These lines have made sense to me since I got introduced to the concept of discrimination in my humanities’ lectures. The long-lived debate about reservation and representation of the disadvantaged sections of the society remains unresolved even today. In this writing, I’ve tried to focus on the representation of member belonging to SC (Scheduled Caste), ST (Scheduled Tribe) and OBC (Other Backward Class) community in the academia. Academia is one of the biggest domains where inclusion must be treated as an urgent priority, because education ensures progress and upliftment.
The three communities (SC, ST and OBC) are categorized according to their rightful reservations of 15%, 7.5% and 27% of the total number of admissions, respectively in higher education. This reservation policy extends for faculties as well, with the relaxation of 5% in NET (National Eligibility Test) for the disadvantaged categories of the society. This is the quantified model of affirmative action which our country’s educational system is supposed to exercise.
Affirmative action is an active attempt to provide equity for disadvantaged sections of society who have been bearers of historical discrimination. The figures over the past 7 years have shown an ascending arrow, as far as the representation of the categories in higher education is concerned. As for the faculties, the debate over measuring representation with keeping either university or department as the measuring unit remains unclear.
The recent update in this issue has been the UGC’s suggestion of keeping a department as the measuring unit of representation across all universities. This is a problematic approach, as analyzed by The Wire. Also quite recently, figures provided by the government show an abysmal representation of members belonging to the SC, ST and OBC community in faculties in central universities across the country.
Such a track is problematic as even with the increasing admissions in higher education, there has been a considerable downfall in the number of teachers making use of reservations. This raises serious concerns about the functioning of affirmative action, also known as positive discrimination.
With an attempt to analyze, I could easily relate Ambedkar’s quote in the context of education. The question is that if a simple rising graph is an appropriate measure for the larger struggles which India’s marginalised have been through over decades?
Furthermore, the question about the impactful outreach of the quota system still remains unanswered. In the current situation, the low number of reserved faculties is a poor result of the reservation system. Getting to the root of this problem, I would like to reflect upon the system at the level of primary education. Conditions are bad at the basic level, either in terms of access to education or quality of it.
Right to Education is a laudable scheme which can bring significant change in terms of improvising literacy, but still, my first-hand interactions with these children made me realize how they were not even able to read the simplest of words properly. Although the RTE is not category specific in terms of representation for the SC, ST and OBC communities, the social and economic disadvantages that they face add to the argument for them having a higher number of attendees under RTE. This leads us to build a case that these sections lag behind in terms of the possession of social capital, till the time higher education is to be acquired.
With such a scenario, quota implementation cannot resolve the situation wholly. Such distorted building blocks add to the struggle of the students. The imbalance persists even after admission, as Rohit Vemula’s story showed the entire nation. Such a reality makes Ambedkar’s argument of ‘value’ all the more relevant today.
Education is not just about having more and more admissions. Although on one hand, that is important, yet on the other, education is also a larger platform for evaluating, analyzing and improving the situation at both micro and macro level. At the macro level, it is the policies and the implementation of the quota mechanism which needs to be checked regularly, so that a situation like today’s is not reached.
At the micro-level, the change has to be regulated by each one of us by contributing in the upliftment of the social capital by reducing the discriminatory practices, by contributing in making primary education better and by building an inclusive culture. These few steps, which definitely can be further extended, are a continuation of positive discrimination from policies application to social dynamics.
Long still is the battle to be liberated entirely from an oppressed environment. History is not quite easy to undo but it is also not too hard to re-write, only and only if our country is able to gather the political, social and individual will.