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Caste Quotas and Formal Inclusion in Indian Higher Education
Satish Deshpande*
On the 26th January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. in politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. in politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. in our social and economic life, we shall by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. how long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? (B. r. Ambedkar, speech to the Constituent Assembly, 25 november 1949).1
Both dr Ambedkar's famous question and the succinct description of indian society that precedes it remain as relevant today as they were 64 years ago. no one was more aware of the irony that the egalitarian Constitution he had helped draft was itself the cornerstone of the âlife of contradictionâ. By superimposing formal equality on a highly unequal society â while guaranteeing property rights and refusing positive constraints on social capital â the Constitution actually empowered the rich and socially dominant âhavesâ. But it also offered the âhave-notsâ something: one egalitarian principle of universal adult franchise; one established precedent of protective discrimination otherwise known as reservations; and many good intentions of a progressive kind. in essence, the history of post-independence india is the story of the intertwined efforts to claim these constitutional legacies, each constrained by the other, albeit in unequal and asymmetrical ways.
This situation, where deep inequalities persist under a thin veneer of formal equality decorated with progressive rhetoric, has also been described as a âpassive revolutionâ. As is well known, the Gramscian term refers to an incomplete or truncated revolution, a ârevolution from aboveâ, and it fits the indian context very well because independence was essentially a transfer of power from a foreign to a local elite. it was indeed something of a revolution that the Constitution of our âsovereign socialist secular democratic republicâ promises to secure for all its citizens âjustice social economic and politicalâ as well as âequality of status and of opportunityâ. But because the revolution was passive and partial, these promises are endlessly deferred, being redeemed only in slow and grudging instalments. Madhav Prasad captures the essence of the matter when he writes that âthere is no militant class backing the Constitution with its iron willâ, so that â[w]hen we rue the absence of the will to change, we are merely acknowledging the fact that we have the letter of the law, in the form of the Constitution, without the spiritâ (Prasad 2011: 45).
The story of reservations is part of this larger saga of the interplay between formal good intentions and substantive change. But because they are a major balancing item in the account between the haves and the have-nots, they become the focus of attention for both sides. indeed, so great is the emphasis on reservations that the policy acts like a giant magnet dragging virtually all discussions about social justice and equality of opportunity into its force field. The excessive emphasis on reservations raises the risk of a metonymic slide that ends up equating reservations with social justice. whereas reservations, especially in higher education, can only provide protected entry or formal inclusion â they cannot deliver social justice. while formal access is obviously an essential precondition, it is still a long way from ensuring that inclusion is âfullâ or substantive, which is what social justice requires. Moreover, reservations policy urgently needs to adapt to recent changes, such as the restructuring of higher education, the deepening differentiations within the groups eligible for reservations, and the shifts in the stances and capabilities of the state.2 whether and to what extent it is able to do so will depend, once again, on the political legacy of the Constitution and the ongoing tussles between the haves and the have-nots.
This chapter provides an overview of the conceptual, historical and policy dimensions of reservations policy in indian higher education. The first section looks at the policy perspectives on equality of access in higher education. The second section provides a summary of the history of modalities and justificatory frameworks. The third section outlines the major changes that have transformed higher education in the past two decades and speculates on the possible directions that reservations policy could take in their wake.
Higher Education and Equality of Access:
Policy Perspectives
The specific features that make higher education a particularly challenging field for the theory and practice of social justice policy may be quickly summarised (for a longer earlier version of the argument, see Deshpande 2009: 41ff.). First, higher education is ânaturally elitistâ in the sense that it is a downstream field that presupposes prior qualifications, which has a filtering effect on aspirants so that relatively few reach it. This filtering may be due to âmerit discriminationâ based on the need for high levels of skill or competence, and/or âresource discriminationâ due to the unequal distribution of the material and non-material resources required to acquire these skills. This leaves room for âsocial discriminationâ (based on prejudices related to race, caste, gender, etc.) to disguise itself as, or to work through, the other kinds of discrimination. The need for merit discrimination in particular may be ideologically exaggerated by the claim that higher education (or at least part of it) is engaged in knowledge production and must therefore cultivate âexcellenceâ to the exclusion of all other objectives (such as those of equity), or even that it must be exempted from such social responsibilities. The key point here is that the road to higher education passes through many kinds of âdiscriminationâ where very different types of distinctions are being made for a variety of different reasons backed by divergent moral or social values.
Second, the nature and force of the right to higher education is a contextual matter rather than a self-evident and universalisable axiom, such as the fundamental right to basic education or medical care. Third, higher education is also a highly desirable asset because it offers the possibility of social mobility and generally carries the promise of high material and non-material rewards. For this reason, the demand for higher education usually exceeds its supply, which means that yet another form of âdiscriminationâ must be practised due to sheer scarcity and the consequent need for rationing. Finally, higher education is usually a strongly contested field because, generally speaking, it is the most legitimate means for sustaining or justifying the existing social order, as well as for changing or overthrowing it. Consequently, higher education is a field where equal access is hard to define, and policies for equalising access are always controversial.
Of course, higher education has been elitist, not only ânaturallyâ (because it necessarily presupposes high levels of prior competencies), but primarily socially or âtraditionallyâ (because of customs or norms that systematically include and exclude particular social groups). The important point here is that the major burden of excluding âunsuitableâ candidates is shifted to the upstream levels of the educational system, i.e., to schooling. As Bourdieu and Passeron3 have shown in their classic work, the âdifferential educational mortality rate of the different social classesâ (1990: 154) that is responsible for filtering the candidate pool ensures that âsocial advantages and disadvantages are progressively retranslated, through successive selections, into educational advantages or disadvantagesâ (p. 160). The overall effect from the point of view of higher education is that
the combination of the educational chances of the different classes and the chances of subsequent success attached to the different sections and types of schools constitutes a mechanism of deferred selection which transmutes a social inequality into a specifically educational inequality, i.e. an inequality of âlevelâ or success, concealing and academically consecrating an inequality of chances of access to the highest levels of education (p. 158).
Bourdieu and Passeron have also argued that the social filtering of the candidate pool as it advances up the education ladder is achieved more through induced self-exclusion rather than explicit elimination through failure in examinations. They even claim that the social purpose of the examination in this context has been misunderstood or exaggerated:
[t]he opposition between the âpassedâ and the âfailedâ is the source of a false perspective on the educational system as a selecting agency. [âŚ] this opposition between the two sub-sets separated by selection in the examination from within the set of candidates hides the relation between this set and its complement (i.e. the set of non-candidates), thereby ruling out any inquiry into the hidden criteria of the election of those from whom the examination ostensibly makes its selection (pp. 153â54).
This perspective fits the indian case fairly well as a broad overview. it is well known, for example, that dropout rates in school are inversely related to class and caste status. The most recent (at the time of writing) official figures on dropout rates and examination pass rates are shown in Table 1.1. The data are shown separately for âAllâ and for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs). The dropout rates are cohort-specific, i.e., the three columns show the cumulative percentage of dropouts from the group that began at Class I level.
Table 1.1: Dropout Rates and Pass Percentages in School, 2005â6
Source: Ministry of human resource development (MHRD) (2008).
By the time this cohort reaches Class V, about 26 per cent of all students have dropped out, but the figure for SCs is about 33 per cent and that for STs close to 40 per cent. By the time Class X is reached, the respective dropout rates are (in round figures) 62, 71 and 79 per cent. These figures show that the gap between dropout rates for âAllâ and for the SCs and STs dips slightly (by one percentage point) at the Class Viii level relative to the Class V level, but rises by two percentage points between the Class Viii and Class X levels. This suggests that more SC and ST students drop out between Class Viii and Class X than students from other caste groups. Considered as an absolute difference in percentages, the gap in the pass rate for the board examinations in Classes X and Xii is slightly less than the gap in dropout rates in Class X. This suggests that although SC/ST students are less likely than other students to reach Class X, once they reach this stage, they âcatch upâ slightly with others in terms of pass percentage. Thus, while the data is much too fragile to bear much interpretive weight, it does seem to lend some plausibility to Bourdieu and Passeron's contention that
previous performances being equal, pupils of working-class origin are more likely to âeliminate themselvesâ from secondary education by declining to enter it than to eliminate themselves once they have entered, and a fortiori more likely not to enter than to be eliminated from it by the explicit sanction of examination failure (p. 153).
But the major problem with the data in Table 1.1 is that it seriously understates inter-caste differences for two reasons. First, because the âAllâ category includes the SC and ST categories, it obviously understates the difference between these categories and the upper castes (UCs). Second, the data, like most official datasets, is silent about the other Backward Classes (OBCs); even if the âAllâ category had excluded the SC and ST groups, it would still lump together the OBCs and the UCs into one group, thus understating the differences between them. These limitations seem severe enough to create doubt as to whether they support the contention noted above, namely that it is not the examination but âunexamined exclusionâ which accounts for the under-representation of lower classes and (by extension) castes as we go up the educational ladder.
The major dataset that offers disaggregation by caste groups is based on the national Sample Survey organisation's (NSSO) regular surveys, especially the big sample quinquennial ones. A number of studies (Basant and Sen 2010, Desai and Kulkari 2008, Deshpande 2006, Sundaram 2006, and others) use this data to look at educational inequalities across social groups, and they offer a much more sophisticated view of the problem of equality of access. in my own earlier work, i have compared shares in the population of graduate degree holders across castes to argue for the presence of significant inequalities of access, and hence for strong protective discrimination policies in higher education. Table 1.2 is based on unit-level data from the 61st round of the NSSO from 2004â5 for urban india. it makes the simple but important point that the dotted line separating the UC hindu and all the rows above it from those below is the major fault line in the indian society. Above the line are the lower caste groups and UC Muslims, whose shares in the population of graduates of various disciplines are less than their shares in th...
