Should caste based reservation be allowed?
04 Jan 2018TL;DR: Caste based reservations should be allowed until caste based discrimination is stopped.
This is an issue which is close to all the Indians and have affected their lives. Despite what the government portrays the ground realities of jobs and education are grim.
On an average there are 20 times more applicants than the number of open positions. Consider NEET which is the eligibility exam for doctors in India, there were 11.5 lakhs (1.1 m) applicants to roughly 56,000 open positions. Out of 56,000 half of the seats are from private colleges which are significantly expensive than the public colleges. The situation is similar or even worse for engineering, chartered accounts or public sector jobs.
To the upper castes, it creates a lot of pressure throughout life whether one is studying or working so they are opposed to it. Some people want government to provide incentives to economically backward people from all castes. This looks like a noble idea, however since everything in India is prone to corruption I highly doubt that people who need the money will actually receive it.
To the lower castes (SC/ST/OBC) this is opens up a window to climb up the ladder both socially and economically. So more and more backward castes want them to be considered themselves included in OBC some OBC castes even want them to be considered SC.
From what I have seen growing up, most people who have received benefits of this reservations are the children of people who have themselves benefitted from reservations once. This opens another problem of whether it is justified to keep giving reservations to people who are already well off?
I was strongly opposed to reservations while I was growing up because it had significantly reduced the number of open seats for me in the colleges I wanted to get admitted to, so I had to settle for a medium tier college. I was also of the opinion that caste based discrimination was a thing of past which is just not true.
Caste based discrimination is very much prevalent in India from North to South. Some people get beaten up because they use wells meant for upper caste. They are not allowed to enter in the temples. People have separate utensils in their homes meant for lower castes. Grooms are not allowed to ride horses in marriage processions. Inter caste marriages are not accepted and sometimes brides and grooms are even killed.
In my opinion, until we are really equal in the society where people are not harassed and inter-caste marriages are a norm, caste based reservations must be allowed.