Quotas: 'OBCs to get too little, too late'

The Oversight Committee set up after protests against quotas for OBCs in higher education institutions will end up creating a paltry 35,000 extra seats for OBCs and another 35,000 for the general category.

The report, which has created divisions in the committee before its release, has been disputed by at least one member, who has pointed out that what it offers OBCs is too little and too late.

Creation of 35,000 seats for OBCs over three years would mean 10,000-odd seats every year for the entire OBC student community of around 2.7 million, committee member and former vice-chancellor of the National Law School Dr Mohan Gopal said.

He said this was because the committee left out two large categories of institutions ones taking central aid and those set up under the central Acts. He has mentioned this in a letter to committee chairman Veerappa Moily.

"All we are offering OBC youths from the vast resources of the central government are some 34,500 additional seats over three years (some 10,000 seats or so a year). This is like offering three large colleges to the whole OBC population of the country," he said.

"With OBC kids being denied opportunities in the interregnum, this is hardly the stuff of revolution or unprecedented expansion, as some of our discussions have tended to suggest,'' he added.

"I would request that the final report should, as agreed previously, make it clear that as envisaged in the Constitution, reservations are to be applied, separate from and deriving from our road map, to all educational institutions, public and private, aided and unaided, at all levels of education,'' he said in his final note to the committee.