The Supreme Court’s decision to allow Tamil Nadu and Karnataka a one-year extension to continue with their policies of reservation for Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes/Other Backward Classes beyond 50 per cent could end up being the thin end of the wedge. Till now, the accepted position, after a Constitution bench of the Court gave its verdict in the Indra Sawhney case in 1992, was that reservations could not exceed 50 per cent. With the Court now saying that this limit could be exceeded if the Backward Commissions in these states accepted the logic for the hike, it is reasonable to assume that other states will look for similar logic to increase their own reservation limits.
Even before the extension given by the Court, the limits of the Indra Sawhney ruling were being tested in various ways. In R K Sabharwal vs the State of Punjab in 1995, the Court ruled that those who got promoted on the basis of seniority-cum-merit would not be counted while determining to what extent the reserved quota had been filled; in Ajay Kumar Singh vs the State of Bihar in 1994, the Court said reservations could be extended from the MBBS course to the MS and MD degrees, since neither were super-specialities; in Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research vs KL Narasimhan in 1997, the Court even said “securing marks is not the sure proof of higher proficiency, efficiency or excellence”.
Since the Court-opened window for Tamil Nadu and Karnataka comes at a time when there is pressure on the government to include collection of data on castes in the decadal census, it is likely that the political class will increasingly see greater reservation as the solution to the problems of SCs/STs and OBCs, instead of looking at broader (and inclusive) issues like over-all development. There is plenty of evidence, from both the official National Sample Surveys (NSS) as well as from the private National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) to show that mere affirmative action in medicine/management/engineering colleges and jobs is not the solution. NSS data, for instance, make it obvious that the high drop-out ratios in schools lie at the root of the lower incomes of the lower castes.
Analysis of data from NCAER’s annual survey of income for 2004-05 takes you a step further and shows that urbanisation is a major factor in income levels rising. Scheduled Caste households in rural areas had an average annual income of Rs 38,622; this rose to Rs 62,334 in towns with less than 5 lakh persons, and to Rs 82,650 in cities with more than 1 million people. With 77 per cent of all Scheduled Caste households in rural areas, it is hardly surprising that the overall incomes of Scheduled Caste people are poor. Indeed, upper caste households in Bihar earn only Rs 51,187 per annum, compared to Rs 62,238 for Scheduled Tribe households in Karnataka.
It is, of course, politically inconvenient, and perhaps suicidal, to argue that the solution to more inclusive growth lies not in reservations (which have been there for 60 years now, with manifestly limited results), but in improving school drop-out ratios and encouraging urbanisation. But it would seem that even the Supreme Court has given in to politically correct thinking.