Convinced this wasn't right, I called up some IIM-A professors and was told, off the record, the figure was more like 5 percentage points. Still not too bad since that meant the SC/ST students were among the top 6 per cent in the country in terms of their rankings in the CAT exams. A call to IIT Bombay revealed similar findings, again off the record. IIT Bombay's dean, I was told by a senior professor, had made a presentation where he said the SC/ST candidates there hadn't scored any worse than the general category students.
For some reason, however, no one was willing to make the data public. Curious, since, if true, that's a really important finding and knocks the bottom of the arguments of the anti-quota group, of which I'm one. Indeed, it flies in the face of a recent data-packed study of the impact of affirmative action in India, by Marianne Bertrand, Rema Hanna and Sendhil Mullainatan (http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13926). The trio (from the Universities of Chicago, New York and Harvard, respectively) looked at the scores of those applying for engineering in one Indian state in 1996 and then re-visited a sample of them 8-10 years later to figure out the impact. The results are amazing.
For one, the average scores are 480 for the upper caste candidates, 419 for the OBCs (13 per cent lower) and a mere 182 for the SC category (62 per cent lower). So, the education rankings for the SCs have either improved dramatically in the last decade or the IIM/IIT reports aren't exactly kosher. But let's leave that since it is also possible, that given the small number of students that need to be admitted to the IITs and the IIMs, there are enough SC/STs who score high marks "" it is curious, of course, that if the IITs are getting such good students they should frame their rules to admit SC/ST candidates who score just 60 per cent that of the last general category student.
Even more curious is what happens after that. The study finds that, on average, upper caste students were earning more than three times what SC students were (see "Partly in the Affirmative," 17/4/08). But this applied to the full sample of those who'd applied for the engineering course, not just those who'd got in. What of those who got into the engineering colleges? Well, the upper castes who went to engineering college in that state in 1996 earned Rs 5,400 more per month than those who didn't while the figure was a much lower Rs 3,200 for SCs. Add to this, the significant salary differences between upper and lower castes to begin with, and it's clear the engineering degree didn't help as much. This would suggest employers are so casteist they pay lower caste students less "" seems difficult to reconcile that with the huge talent shortage we're witnessing. Or that there were significant differences between the candidates to begin with "" in English, presentation skills, and so on "" and the engineering colleges did little to change this! It would be interesting to get IIT/IIM numbers as well on this aspect of things. After all, if the reputation of the IIMs and the IITs is based just on the quality of the students they get, it doesn't speak volumes for their teaching, does it?
The other interesting finding relates to the creamy layer, or the well-off among the OBCs, which the Supreme Court said would not be allowed to get reservation benefits. The study points out that while lower caste students get relatively low salaries anyway, the economically worse off among them get even lower salaries. Second, in all caste groups, it is the creamy layer than goes in for higher education including that in engineering and management courses. In the case of the upper castes, while the average family income in the state was Rs 6,681 (the NSS data cited are for consumption, so I'm assuming this is 60% of income), that for families whose children had applied for engineering degrees was Rs 12,790; for OBCs it was Rs 4,991 and Rs 8,947; for SCs, Rs 4,153 and Rs 8,081. In other words, if the creamy layer is to be excluded from reservations, chances are there won't be enough OBCs to benefit from reservations, especially since the Court has said the qualifying marks for admission cannot be lowered by more than 10 per cent. Being against quotas, I welcome it; one wonders how the quota warriors welcoming the Court's judgment plan to explain this to their votebanks.
