Data and reservations

It is an old problem that when an issue concerning the direct interests of millions of people becomes a political football, to be kicked around by all and sundry, one of the early casualties is rational debate""because emotion and perceptions of self-interest take over. The debate on reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) is going down this familiar route; it needs to be rescued and aligned with the facts as they are known.

The debate so far has assumed two things, that OBCs have been discriminated against and that this has resulted in their remaining poor. As it happens, neither assumption may be correct. As various sociologists have pointed out, the traditional form of discrimination in India has been by restricting entry to temples and access to the village well. While this is certainly valid as a charge in the case of the Scheduled Castes and perhaps the Scheduled Tribes (SC/STs), as well, it is demonstrably not true of the OBCs, who in many states have grabbed political power and in a real sense are empowered and therefore become the dominant caste in many areas. As the economist Surjit Bhalla demonstrated on this page last Saturday by using data from the National Sample Survey and the National Fertility and Health Statistics, the OBC is representative of the average Indian. It hardly needs pointing out that it is innately illogical to argue for affirmative action to benefit the average person.

The OBCs, for instance, have a level of participation in the workforce that is slightly better than the national average. The average wage for OBCs is only 6.4 per cent lower than the average Indian wage, despite the OBC education level being 8.5 per cent lower. And OBC fertility levels are a tad lower than the average, which is the opposite of what you'd expect if they were economically backward. A smaller percentage of OBCs read newspapers than the average, but they visit cinemas more often. The list goes on and there is no evidence of consistent discrimination or the presence of severe handicaps that mandate special treatment.

Other data show the real issue in the case of communities (include the Muslims) that are now demanding reservation is neither caste nor religion. What comes through as the key issue is school education. The figures on education levels show that the OBCs are about as badly off as the SCs. In the poorest quintile in the rural areas of the country, NFHS data show that SCs had 1.6 years of education, compared to 1.7 years for the OBCs (and 2.2 years for upper-caste Hindus). The picture is no different when it comes to the topmost income quintile, for the SCs in the rural areas had 2.6 years of education, compared to 2.8 years for OBCs and 6.1 years for upper-caste Hindus. At this level, the problem is clearly one of spreading school education and making it accessible""and what is most relevant here is reform of the government school system and addressing the categories of people that it reaches. Reservation in tertiary institutes at the graduate level does not address this problem, and will probably be of greatest benefit only to the "creamy layer" in these categories""which might well explain the strength of the demand that is being made for reservation at the university level. As in the case of subsidies that are handed out in the name of the poor but captured by the middle class and even the wealthy, the demand for reservations does not have the really needy as its target beneficiaries.