Affirmative action as strategy

SWOT

Pardon me for covering old ground, but I can't help thinking that if private corporations did not run quite so scared, there might actually find a durable, strategic solution to this affirmative action controversy. Yes, private corporations have a valid point: India's competitive advantage cannot be built with job quotas and reservations. To which it might well be added that the policy of ever-increasing reservations has patently not worked. It's been around since the fifties, has been periodically extended and eventually hardened into the strictures of the Mandal Commission that spawned a new genre of caste power politics bringing the Mayawatis, Mulayams and Lalu Prasads to the forefront of national attention in north India.

Yet the fact that the issue refuses to go away and has become a major factor in competitive politics indicates that reservations and their efficacy thereof""and indeed, the question of their linkage with the political economy""are all issues that demand creative solutions beyond fixing job and university quotas and determining who qualifies for other backward caste (OBC) status. Many commentators have correctly pointed out that affirmative action""or "positive discrimination" as the British call it""at the primary and secondary levels of education would be a far more effective remedy than reserving seats at institutes of higher education or even within the corporate sector, public or private.

There is no gainsaying, too, that economic liberalisation and growth will create their own momentum of prosperity and lift more and more people out of rank poverty. History has shown that markets are, by and large, a quintessential social leveller. Which is why, even as some Indians may choose to remain casteist in their private lives, competitive markets demand skills that force corporations to look beyond race, gender and caste. Today, no corporation in India, if it really wants to stay viable, can afford to stipulate the caste, religion and increasingly even gender of their human resources.

A contemporary analogy can be drawn from the booming industry of European soccer, where, despite rampant racism on the continent, players from Africa, South America and Asia are beginning to dominate traditional all-"white" teams. They have little to sell except their prodigious talent, which forms the foundation of the world's best teams""and creates a virtuous circle of growth and equity.

The issue at hand is basically one of providing not just equal opportunity but equal access to opportunity to those who lack it. In poor and developing economies like India with their intricate social structures, the issue of bootstrapping backward sections of society out of their poverty is a complex problem. Over the longer term""and not least in the interests of sustaining India's competitive advantage""it is an issue that urgently needs to be addressed.

It would be unrealistic for the private sector to think that this is an issue that is exclusively the government's preserve. Corporations cannot and do not work in isolation of the societies in which they operate. If they are truly thinking long term and strategically, corporations in India""whether Indian or foreign""need to be as concerned about the fact that a significant proportion of India's population remains excluded from access to quality education. If anything, they need to be doubly concerned, given the massive skills shortage that McKinsey recently predicted. As Dr Shankar Acharya, former chief economic advisor, wrote in his column about a year and a half ago, the maximum population growth in India is taking place in the BIMARU states. These are states that continue to turn in the worst human development indicators. In other words, if this section of the population does not rise out of poverty, illiteracy and poor health, India's famed "demographic dividend" will continue to be a demographic liability as, let's face it, it currently is.

To my mind, this fact provides a vital clue to corporations in India and this includes multinationals with long-term interests in the country. Many of them currently talk about leveraging technology to deliver the benefits of education and health to excluded sections of India's population. Some are now working in partnership with governments to deliver such services. But overall - and there are honourable exceptions "" these initiatives smack of tokenism; they are largely placebos offered to assuage officialdom rather than deliver meaningful, sustained gains. A more focused, serious and long-term engagement in investing in and delivering education, not just higher education, to those who have limited or no access to it should transcend the somewhat cynical altruism of "corporate social responsibility". Eventually it is corporations in India who will stand to benefit.

India currently talks of leveraging best practices from other countries to emerge as an economic power. By consciously making itself an agent of social progress at the grassroots, the private sector in India could well establish a best practice for other countries to follow.

The views here are personal