Reasonable Reading

Kartar Singh, former Director of the Institute of Rural Management Anand, writes in The Indian Express:

I am convinced that: one, securing social justice for everyone – and not necessarily only for the people belonging to SCs, STs, and OBC – is a desirable goal. Two, as borne out by the experience of the last half century, reservation is not the best available instrument to achieve the goal of social security for all. Three, the proposed reservation will not secure social justice to those who are deprived of it – it will only benefit the creamy layer of the eligible classes who are neither poor nor in need of social justice. There are other alternatives to reservation which are financially more efficient, socially more equitable and politically more acceptable.

I find a reflection of my sentiments on the ongoing reservation imbroglio in the above and a possible solution in the following where Shekhar Gupta asks the Prime Minister for a 1991 reprise:

This is the last – but perhaps the most destructive – relic of the licence quota raj. The quota crisis, and the fortuitous arrival of higher education on the political centrestage is in many ways similar to the other crisis that led to India mortgaging its gold to escape payment defaults. Finance Minister Manmohan Singh managed to convert that crisis into an opportunity that changed our lives. Can he similarly in today’s crisis in higher education do the same for our children? Surely, this situation is no less daunting in its risks and complexities. But the rewards of expansion, opening up, private investment, genuine administrative and intellectual freedoms in a society that lays such a premium on education and scholarship will be no less significant.