Reservations – Lessons to Learn

So the entire country is split into two on this reservation. I did give my humble opinion on this here. I am not sure how many people read it but I did not get any results for my poll expect my own I still feel this whole reservation malarkey is a waste of time and energy and it is just a spring board for the politicians of our beloved country.

There were a lot of mails floating around on this and I felt this was the best of the mails.

Here is the current % of reservation for all Tamil Nadu state higher education institutes and govt. services - BC- 46.14%, MBC- 17.43%, (Most Backward Castes) De-notified Communities 3.44%, SC- 19% ST- 1.04% The total comes to 87.05% (it is NOT just 69% as it is made out to be which is old number, MBC was the last category to get added). So, 69% people of the state were covered by reservation for 35 years (since the advent of Dravida Parties) and they still remain backward and want to retain reservations!! Not just that, they want the 27% in central govt. institutions also now - people are screaming in pro-reservation rallies in TN... Imagine the state of the 13% of the remaining innocents - the ones who were explicitly kept out of this reservation ring (mainly Brahmins plus a few semi-rich trading castes & some fringe communities who don’t have any political clout). Every other caste has managed to get themselves into the "reserved" category, either through caste based vote bank or through violent methods. There are frequent demands to move certain castes from BC into MBC. In spite of all this, you see the victimized and over-punished "none reserved" people of Tamil Nadu rising and shining, many a times becoming outstanding achievers, within the state and outside. This is because

a) The system makes them exert so hard even for survival, so they come out bright, like molten gold

b) Many institutes of learning are either in private hands (private high schools, engineering colleges) or with central government (IITs, IIMs), this has been a great boon.

The very fact that these 87% still want to cling on to the reservation shows how afraid and intimidated they are to compete with the tiny 13% (that is left out) if the reservations were removed!

What does this show? Instead of improving and developing people's competencies, these many years of reservations have made them so stagnant, incompetent, non-confident, selfish and fearful of their prospects under open competition.