Reservation in education

Some time back, I had mentioned one of my favourite quotes ever.

I’d have no desire to penalize a man because he’s worth only fifteen dollars a week. But I’ll be damned if I can see why a man worth forty must be penalized--and penalized in favor of the one who’s less competent.

I think the main reason I love this quote is its relevance to the situation in India's reservation system. A person,from the forward castes, who gets 96% (say) in his board exams is in trouble because he has not got enough marks to get a seat from through open quota, yet he is not "backward" enough to get in through the reserved quotas. If there were no reservation, there is a great chance that he gets in comfortably.

Yet he is penalized, for no fault of his, in favour of one who is less meritorious than him. The irony is that the person who gets in through the reserved quota is, at times, better off financially than the guy who misses the cut, as the latter belongs to the "forward" caste.

I feel this entire caste system is totally screwed up. You have people from so called forward castes who are struggling to make ends meet and who cant afford seats in private colleges. Their kids have to get really high marks to get merit seats. You also have people from "backward" castes who are very well off. Not only that, their kids can afford to be less meritorious as the cutoffs for them are much lesser.

I really don't see how reservation is ever going to eliminate disparities between various "castes". Like most customs, it may have been valid during its conception, but it no longer makes sense, yet it is preserved like most customs, because we never understood the customs properly in the first place.

I think, ideally, we should do away with reservation and introduce a system which enables poor families to get access to the resources that are required to study well and get in meritoriously, irrespective of caste,colour or creed. In other words, do away with the entire caste system. Give financial assistance to the families that cannot afford to give their kids the resources that are required for them to compete on a level playing field with other students.

A friend of mine had another idea. Instead of reservation based on castes, you have reservation based on your financial status. The actual percentage of reservation is based on the percentage of people who can be classified as poor enough to deserve reservation.

While this still has the same fundamental drawback as the existing system ( instead of penalizing a student for not being backward, it would penalize a student for not being poor), this would help in breaking the caste system and atleast, bring in some amount of fairness to the injustice that would be done.

And I feel that moving from this system to a no-reservation system would be a lot easier.