Some thoughts on Reservation...

Reservation for backward communities has again become the hot topic for discussion, thanks to some polititians who are trying to take political mileage out of it. Here are my thoughts on it...

Reservation is not the answer to our country's problems. I want to abolish reservation. We, as a country, is competing in a global environment, and by lowering the bar for a few, we are doing injustice to them. We are not preparing them to compete in a global environment.

The students from the backward communities are actually not previlaged in the quota system. Even though some will disagree with me, a majority of them don't get benefited by this. They gets into the colleges and schools with this guilt that they didn't get there because they deserve it - even if they have the capability within to achieve more, had the background and situation be different. And everyone will look at them through this colored viewpoint, that they are somehow "lower" than the rest of the folks, ignoring the fact that this person had to fight his way all through, and there is a real possibility that this person is more capable than any of them. And we are not giving them a chance to compete in a fair playground. Even if he is meritorious, the society will brand him as "backward" and try to degrade his achievements. There is no bigger disgrace than this, to a human as an individual.

We have to work on creating that level playground for every citizen of India. To create that level playing field, we should start at the grassroots level to provide education to every child in the country. There should be initiatives from Governments and NGOs to spread the awareness on the need for education. This is has to be a continuous process and not a one time activity. Education should be made free to everyone till they reach 12th Std. Schemes should be deviced to attract children from all sections of the society to get their basic education. If we can get all the children in the current generation to attend at least the primary school, we can assume that they will ensure that their next generation will go till high school, at least a step ahead of the current generation. If that happens, we have succeeded in our mission to spread the awareness. The next generation will take it even further, and so on...

We are witnessing a "hate campaign" against the backward community. Many of the images which appear in the media are biased. After all these, how many of us, the so called forward community, will look at someone from the other section without a bias..? It's a sad, but true.

An working example to look in this regard is the "Affirmative Action" in US. There are umpteen web resources available to explain what it is. So I am not going into the details here. But in a nutshell, it is about "Employment programs required by federal statutes and regulations designed to remedy discriminatory practices in hiring minority group members; i.e. positive steps designed to eliminate existing and continuing discrimination, to remedy lingering effects of past discrimination, and to create systems and procedures to prevent future discrimination; commonly based on population percentages of minority groups in a particular area. Factors considered are race, color, sex, creed, and age." This definition is taken from: http://www.answers.com/affirmative+action?nafid=3

In the Indian context, we have to add caste, sub caste, regional differences etc.

Thinking of the fallouts of todays reservations... If the goal is to uplift backward classes, there has to be a day this upliftment is complete, and they have to stop all reservations.... Like that is ever going to happen.... right...? All sarcasms apart, did you see the point..? It's un-thinkable that there is one day when reservations will go away... The corollary to that is... the backward classes will always be backward, and this reservation is really not helping....

It is going to take a lot of courage from the administration to remove reservation and suggest and implement something like this. Imagine the kind of scenes our streets are going to witness if they decide to withdraw reservation to everyone. It will be a lot worse than what we witnessed in Bangalore streets following the death of Rajkumar. So the government should be thinking twice before increasing the coverage of reservation. Obviously our government is not thinking. And it is a sad situation that they are making it difficult for the future governments and the people of this country as well.

I am hoping that someone with sense will prevail over the polititians and open their eyes to the reality before it is too late...