Comment

Levelling the playing field

THE subject of reservations has once again generated a lot of heat and indignation. What it has not generated, though, is a larger discussion of options before us, and a deeper assessment of what it is that we ultimately all want.

No one thinks of reservations as the perfect way to integrate our best educational institutions. But as no one has dug deeper to find better solutions, and time has been passing, we have got stuck on just one fix that is badly flawed: flawed, because it smacks of charity, and because it portrays the poor of India as undeserving.

Why hasn’t education worked to bring the brightest of our poor/OBC/dalit children into the IITs and our best medical colleges? The answer is reservations. Almost all places in our best institutes are reserved: for children who know English, children whose parents could afford private school fees, children whose parents could afford to pay steep tuition costs.

It is also a fact that the number of seats in top quality institutions has not been growing as it should have. Our colleges are way back in the shortages era, when you had to scramble to get a car or a phone. It is amazing that the IIT sector has barely grown at all since the first five were set up. Meanwhile China is planning to have 100 IIT-class universities. What are our plans?

We must expand. But in the meanwhile we have to start levelling the playing field, because it is inconceivable that only India’s elite could have ‘merit’. We have to start bringing in the best of the rest into the good schools to give them a fighting chance of succeeding without reservations. We need to look at options. Here is the case of another country, an Indian-majority country, and how it handled the problem back in the early 1960s.

Right after independence, the Government of Trinidad and Tobago was determined to make the educational system less elite, while preserving its high quality. At that time there were very few government secondary schools, but a larger number of private secondary schools run by church boards. The first move was to formally delink primary education from secondary education, and ensure that there were enough primary schools. The next was a longer-term project to build enough secondary schools to cater to all children.

In the meanwhile there was still the problem of the existing secondary schools being elite. The solution to that was ingenious. After a lot of negotiation, all the private secondary schools were semi-nationalized. Specifically, they became ‘government-assisted’ schools. The earlier boards still ran the schools and selected the staff, but all teachers’ salaries and running expenses were paid by the government. The government also committed to match any funds a school raised for expansion.

In return, what the government demanded was the right to select the students. Children submitted their choice of schools, and the best schools were the hardest to get into. Then 80 per cent of each school’s intake was selected directly by the government, while each school had discretionary powers in choosing the remaining 20 per cent from a long list of those who made a lower cutoff. In effect, the ones seen as needing a reservation quota were the tail end of the elite!

How the government selected the children was by putting all children through a national high-stakes exam in class V, similar to the SATs, conducted over a full day and graded by computer. Even children in the junior school sections of the private schools had to take the exam to be promoted to class VI. In any case, within a few years the good government-assisted schools phased out their junior school sections, and focused on being the best secondary schools. Primary and secondary education was now completely separate. To go to secondary school meant a change of school.

The elites did not vanish from the good schools. It is hard to design an exam for class V children that does not tilt towards what elites know. But what happened, instantly, was a huge influx of the brightest non-elite children, coinciding with the big shift to class VI. There were enough of them that they brought in a whole new local culture that was refreshing and confident.

This sort of radical restructuring of the schooling system is clearly a more awesome task than just doling out a few reservations. But if we decided to do it (in the name of merit!) it really could work. The private schools would not be averse to having brighter, harder-working students, better able to utilize their better teaching and facilities, especially as it would entail no financial loss: the government would be a partner, defraying the costs. Children joining in class VI would quickly pick up English in a total-immersion environment, especially as they would have begun learning it as a second language before. And the elite children in class VI, used to an easy time, would find themselves working harder, confronted with poor children intent on doing well.

It is time to look squarely at the education sector. The Supreme Court rulings against nursery interviews point to something like the Trinidad solution, where primary schooling first becomes universal, and of universally good quality. The selection is then deferred until an exam held in class V, when the child is in a better position to be assessed, but not too old to make up for a bad start. And this should, in a few years, do away with the need for reservations at the university level.

Peggy Mohan

 

Reservation in higher education

THE recent controversy on the OBC quota issue has led to a useful debate. While a large variety of critical issues have been identified in this debate, a few interesting ones have not received enough attention. This communication flags some of them without claiming to analyze the quota issue in any holistic manner. Moreover, this communication is not intended to take a particular view on the reservation debate but add new dimensions to the existing views.

Let me state at the outset that I am in favour of affirmative action to enhance opportunities for the underprivileged. But I believe that the nature, scope and the extent of affirmative action needs to be debated before any policy of positive discrimination (PD) is adopted. Weisskopf (2004) in his insightful work has argued that the determination of whether or not a particular identity group is worthy of PD depends on the answers to three questions:¹

1. Is the group significantly disadvantaged? In other words, do its members on average lag well behind the societal average with respect to various indicators of well-being, status and achievement?

2. Is the group’s disadvantage attributable in significant part to its identity? Identity here does not refer to any notion of innate ability associated with the group, but to the way in which members of the group have been and are treated by others in the society: does being identified as a group member expose one to various forms of discrimination on the part of non-group members?

3. Does the group have certain characteristics that contribute to the generation of positive rather than negative consequences from policies of positive discrimination in its favour?

According to him, only if the answers to all three of these questions are affirmative can a good case be made for considering the adoption of PD policies in favour of a particular identity group.² It is not my intention here to answer these three questions in the context of OBCs or any other community. I just wish to emphasize that satisfaction of only one of the conditions listed above may be necessary but not a sufficient condition for PD and use these questions as anchors to raise a few issues that might enlarge the scope of the ongoing debate.

A. How disadvantaged is the identity group? Are we using the right numbers?

Participants in the ongoing debate have used a variety of estimates as measures of the extent of under-representation of OBCs in higher education. Deshpande and Yadav (2006), for example, show that the proportion of graduates in the population aged 20 years and above was significantly lower for OBCs (about 2 per cent in rural and 7 per cent in urban areas) than for upper caste Hindus (5 per cent in rural and 25 per cent in urban areas). The percentage of graduate population among Muslims, SCs and STs was even lower than OBCs in both urban and rural areas. While nobody can deny the under-representation of OBCs, SCs, STs and Muslims in higher education, these percentages based on the stock of population which is more than 20 years old can be quite misleading. Potentially, it can underestimate the participation in higher education for those groups that have experienced a significant change in levels of education in the last generation. The population stock aged 20 years and above captures approximately two generations of people. If levels of education have changed in the positive direction for the more recent generation, the percentages reported above would underestimate the participation levels in higher education.

The appropriate measure of the ‘current status’ of participation in education has to be based on estimates that capture population that is currently studying.³ For example, if we focus on the age cohort of 6-13 years, children of this age group should be in primary schools. Similarly, higher age groups correspond to higher levels of education. For various socio-religious groups, the table below provides shares in student population for each age cohort along with the shares in the total population in the cohort. The difference between the two percentages would show under or over representation in each age category.

There is hardly any difference between the share in the student and the total population for different socio-religious groups when one focuses on the 6-13 years age cohort. But as expected, the gap builds up as one moves to higher age cohorts; the share in the student population for the SC/ST, Muslim and OBC categories starts to become smaller than their shares in the population in the higher age cohorts. However, the gaps are larger for SC/STs and Muslims than for Hindu OBCs.

The age cohort of 18-22 years constitutes the group that is expected to be in college seeking to be a graduate. Interestingly for Hindu OBCs, the share in the student population in this age group is only about six percentage points lower than their share in the population. Moreover, Hindu OBCs constitute more than 24 per cent of college going population. To take the argument a little further, one can compute the ratio between the share in the college going population and in the total population in each age cohort for different socio-religious groups. A ratio that is more than one would represent ‘over-representation’, while ratios lower than one would imply ‘under-representation’. A quick computation for the college going age cohort (not reported here) would reveal that the degree of under-representation is significantly higher for SC/STs than for Hindu OBCs. And the conditions faced by general Muslims are similar to those of Hindu OBCs while OBC Muslims face much higher under-representation.

The rationale for the proposed 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in higher education has not been clearly stated so far. The estimates presented above suggest that if the proposed reservation level is to be based on some measure of under-representation, the proposed level should be reviewed not only in the context of their share of OBCs in total population (regarding which there is already a debate) and the share of graduates in the stock of population of 20+ years but also in the context of their share among those who are already pursuing higher (college) education. A related question is whether the ‘level’ of reservation (if and when implemented) needs to be reviewed periodically in the light of the changes in participation of OBCs (or any other group) in higher education.

One can still argue that the representation of certain socio-religious groups in well known institutions of higher learning (e.g., IITs, IIMs, and Central universities) is much lower than the population share and hence some kind of PD is desirable. This might well be true but we do not have any data to estimate the extent of under-representation in such institutions. Besides, we might get into issues related to autonomy of these institutions (which is desirable) and reputation effects, issues we will revert to later.

B. How significant is the group’s identity in explaining its disadvantage?

It is very difficult to answer this question and I will not even try. The only thing that I wish to emphasize is that we need to compile evidence on the incidence of various kinds of mistreatment of group members – such as discrimination, stigmatization as inferior, persecution, infliction of violence – in contexts where the victimization is clearly attributable to the group identity of the victim. Hard evidence on this may be difficult but I suppose there is enough evidence to show that it is true for most disadvantaged groups, including SC/STs, OBCs and Muslims. One can argue that all this is so obvious that asking for evidence is almost like making a mockery of such a grave social issue. Nonetheless, I still feel that in the current context, it is desirable to generate estimates of the extent to which group under-representation in higher education is attributable to group identity, as opposed to socioeconomic disadvantage. For example, using NSSO individual level data it may be possible to estimate and compare the probability of being a graduate student for different socio-religious groups, controlling for household assets, gender, per capita expenditure and location (rural/urban, state). The argument for PD in higher education would get strengthened if we find that even after controlling for other relevant characteristics, caste (OBC, SC, ST) or religious status affects participation in higher education. But if other characteristics are more important, policy focus may need to lie elsewhere rather than caste/community based positive discrimination. Unfortunately, at the moment no such exercise is available.⁴

C. Does the group have characteristics conducive to the generation of net benefits from positive discrimination?

Like the last one, this question also has several dimensions that may not be very easy to explore empirically. I only wish to raise a couple of points that have some bearing on the issues relating to the ‘creamy layer’ and reputation of beneficiary groups and institutions of higher learning.

Often groups that need the support of PD carry a stigma; a variety of bad attributes including inefficiency, lower capabilities and inappropriate social attitudes are associated with these groups. One of the key objectives of PD is to remove/reduce this stigma. Good performance is essential to reduce the stigma associated with PD beneficiaries. In other words, if positive discrimination (i.e., preferential access to demanding positions in jobs and education) for group members is to attain its goals, it is important that beneficiaries be able to perform reasonably well in a position to which PD policies will give them better access. For this one needs to focus on those group members whose background, talent and training make them ‘fairly well’ qualified to succeed in the position – i.e., not qualified enough to attain the position without positive discrimination, but also not so much less qualified that they are unlikely to succeed in the position. This would imply that if PD leads to significant dilution of the entry criteria, the performance post entry would be poor and the stigma attached to these groups would persist.

One can take the view that the extant entry and performance criteria in elite educational institutions are inappropriately defined and do not measure the intrinsic capabilities of students. But so long as such criteria are used and certain institutional structures exist, one has no other option but to use the same criteria to evaluate students from various backgrounds. Interestingly, if better performance to remove the stigma attached to one’s socio-religious identity is considered desirable, a bar on creamy layer to avail of PD may not be desirable! This is so because the students from the creamy layer would be better equipped to perform in currently defined entry and post entry evaluations.

Another aspect affected by the quality of the intake relates to the reputation of the institution. If certain institutions of higher learning have acquired good reputations through long years of autonomy and consistently applying internally generated entry and performance criteria, any significant tinkering with that can potentially affect these reputations adversely and also undermine the autonomy these institutions have enjoyed so far. So while removal of the creamy layer from PD has an intuitive logic, it can potentially undermine the reputation of the institutions as well as defeat the objective of removing stigma through PD initiatives.⁵

Finally, long years of competitive politics, especially at the state level, has meant that the distinction between the ‘backwards’ and the ‘non-backwards’ has blurred. The state and central lists of OBCs do not necessarily match and there is significant uncertainty about who should be categorized as backward. Any PD related initiative can get easily distorted if one cannot clearly and unambiguously draw the line between membership and non-membership in the group. The politics of entry into the ‘coveted’ group can lead to its own distortions which we can live without.

Rakesh Basant

 

Footnotes:

1. While the logic of these questions can be obvious at one level, space constraints do not permit me to get into the details of why these three questions are critical. Interested readers will find the book very useful.

2. One might add that whether or not such policies should indeed be adopted will depend also on other factors, such as the larger societal context and the sphere in which the policies are to be applied. One issue that might need to be analyzed in this context is the political implications of any PD related intervention. For example, PD for OBCs and for religious minorities might have completely different types of political repercussions. Consequently, the support and the eventual implementation of such PD initiatives might differ. Recent pronouncements by the government have suggested that reservation on the basis of religion is unconstitutional. But one might argue that if both religious minorities as well as OBCs satisfy the three conditions mentioned above, why should the government shy away from constitutional changes? I am not recommending reservation for Muslims but highlighting the inconsistency of the governmental logic.

3. This is not to deny the utility of having large number of educated people in the population stock of a community; the positive externalities of having well educated persons in one’s midst are clearly high.

4. An interesting study on determinants of household expenditure on education (Tilak, 2000) did try to explore the role of religion and caste. However, no clear results emerged.

5. This is not to suggest that institutions cannot modify entry criteria to make them more ‘inclusive’ and/or undertake programmes to remedy ‘capability gaps’ that may remain post entry. Admittedly, this may even add to their reputations. In any case, institutions need to have the autonomy to define these criteria.

 

References:

S. Deshpande and Y. Yadav (2006), ‘Redesigning Affirmative Action: Castes and Benefits of Higher Education’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLI (4), 2419-2424.

J.B.G. Tilak (2000), ‘Determinants of Household Expenditure on Education in Rural India’, National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi.

T.E. Weisskopf (2004), Affirmative Action in the United States and India: A Comparative Perspective, Routledge.