Here goes another post, to the sewer that is.
First you say social discrimination exists. On the other hand you yourself have no firsthand knowledge of it. Have you surveyed these areas you say have social discrimination? Have you been to every single of the village or even majority of villages? I am sure you haven't.
You know jack about me or my profession. Let it remain that way.
As i have already said my best friend is from small village in Bihar and he also said social discrimination does not exists anymore, though it existed in the past. As he lives in the region that you keep talking about and he has made it without any reservation, I think thats more than enough data to understand who has got the right picture of the social discrimination.
A country of 100+ crores and experience of one is “enough” ? You sure you are not insane ?
One more thing you keep contradicting yourself on is the examples. You keep giving me examples of poor people and still you refuse to believe that economic reservation would be better. Again and again i keep saying this, if 90% of reserved people are poor, they would still be able to take benefit of reservation based on economic condition as criteria. You keep ignoring this simple logic and keep telling me that they will not get the benefit. If they can get a caste certificate, surely its not so hard to show amount of money they earn!
Yes it is. Clue – BPL certificates
You are asking us to give data on wealthy SC/ST/OBC. Have you even read the mandal commission report? Have you heard about the creamy layer criteria suggested by them and ignored by government. Isnt that DATA?
Is that how you are going to argue now. Anyway. Yes, I have read Mandal Commission report, not in entirety though. And yes, I know what is creamy layer and I also know, the impediments of selecting the creamy layer, which I am sure you do not have too much of an idea. If you had, you wouldn’t have raised the issue, here.
I will tell you the fault in your logic. You believe since the number of wealthy people is much less than poor, most poor people will get benefit (which is an economic criteria by the way). Once again you are displaying your ignorance about reality when you say these types of things. The total number of seats in institutions is much less than total no poor people for one thing. Then you are also ignorant about how many poor SC/ST/OBC get to these institution……Most of them dont need it
1st bold: To put it correctly, socio-economic criteria. The term “socio” makes this criteria unique.
2nd bold: It is this “Most” that I am trying to get a figure on. One of your friends has pulled a figure right out of his butt. What are you going to do. Pull it from your own or his ? Almost every anti-reservationist, on this forum is using this excuse. Now if this is such a common experience, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to pull a figure from somewhere.
Also you are saying SC/ST/OBC will be denied admission if quota system does not exit which is totally wrong as the people will be jailed if they do something like that and not because there is a quota system but because that will be the violation of constitutional rights of people of India.
This I got from Mandal Commission report. Previously, before part of Mandal Commission was implemented and un-occupied quotas were not frozen, IITs and BITs used an ingenious method. They simply didn’t fill there quota and in some cases they just wouldn’t fill a single seat (that happened with BITs). The un-occupied quotas were then filled up by general quota students and needless to say, rampant corruption ensued. That’s why Mandal Commission froze the quotas. Even then, IITs do not fill up their quota, since, they are not obliged to.
Denial doesn’t have to be direct. There are ten thousand ways of bending a rule without breaking it.
If you still say that social discrimination exits, then again your logic fails. Why? Because it exits only for the poor SC/ST/OBCs. So they come under less money criteria and so they still get the benefit of reservation. If people are not letting them study when they have got reservation on economic basis, why would they let them study when caste based reservation exits? Isnt that illogical?
Once again, you are ignoring the “socio” part of the “socio-economic” criteria. Professor Sen to the rescue again.
“The blighting of the lives of Dalits or people from other disadvantaged castes, or of members of Scheduled Tribes, is particularly severe when the caste or tribal adversities are further magnified by abject penury” (
The Argumentative Indian, pg 207)
Since you are an engineer, you know it better than me – Garbage In, Garbage Out or GIGO. If premise is wrong, the conclusion would be wrong.
Your premise:
The caste discrimination is essentially, due to economic disparity and the existence of rich/middle class backward caste, who are able to carry on with their lives/vocations/professions, without discrimination, prove that caste discrimination is actually another form of economic discrimination. Therefore removing economic disparity will automatically remove caste based discrimination
Your conclusion:
Reservation should be based on economic criteria, since it is the primary basis of discrimination.
Wrong premise, wrong conclusion. The reality is just the opposite, as far as SC/ST/OBCs are concerned.
From “
Economic exclusion & poverty in India” by Sukhadeo Thorat:
Sukhadeo Thorat said:
Broadly speaking, social exclusion can be defined as “the process through which individuals or groups are wholly or partially excluded from full participation in the society within which they live.” The concept rightly focuses on both the processes by which social and economic institutions exclude groups, and the multidimensional nature of the adverse consequences experienced by those who are excluded.
Social exclusion is group-based in nature. Economic exclusion or discrimination affects whole groups in a society, independent of the income, productivity, or merit of individuals within the group. Anyone can be excluded from access to markets because of lack of income, or from employment on the grounds of low productivity, or from admission to educational institutions on the basis of low merit.
In the case of group-based exclusion, however, the basis for exclusion is group identity and not the economic or productive characteristics of the specific individual. While exclusion does result in the denial of economic opportunities—such as access to capital assets, development of skills, and education—
the originating cause is not lack of income, productivity, or merit but rather the individual’s group identity.
It is quite clear that in
so far as exclusion and discrimination involve the denial of access to resources, employment, education, and public services, they certainly impoverish the lives of excluded individuals. Economic theory also implies that such discrimination can hamper economic growth by reducing efficiency. Labor market discrimination causes less than optimal allocation of labor among firms and sectors (given that those who are discriminated against receive a lower wage than their marginal product), and it reduces the effort expended by workers who perceive themselves to be discriminated against. Discrimination also results in inefficiency by reducing the magnitude of investments in human capital by discriminated groups and by reducing the return to any human capital investments made. Discrimination is thus a concern not only for equity but also for economic growth, and in this way it affects poverty both directly by adversely affecting the income distribution and indirectly by affecting economic growth.
(For the uninitiated, it means, that social exclusion, read discrimination, directly and indirectly results in economic backwardness.)
It is important to recognize the uniqueness of caste discrimination. The caste system involves exclusion and discrimination in multiple market and nonmarket transactions and societal interactions. Exclusion for scheduled castes (those at the very bottom of the caste hierarchy) may involve:
1. limited access to markets such as land, inputs, consumer goods, and social services;
2. differences between prices charged or received and market prices;
3. exclusion from participating in certain categories of jobs and sale of certain consumer goods such as vegetables or milk because the occupational and physical touch of individuals from scheduled castes is considered “polluting”;
4. discrimination in the use of public services such as roads, temples, and water bodies; and
5. physical or residential exclusion that prevents contact with community members and full participation in community life.
... Those in scheduled castes (SCs) have a lower average level of expenditure than those in other castes, resulting in a rural poverty rate of 35 percent among SCs compared with 21 percent among other castes, and an urban poverty rate of 39 percent among SCs compared with 15 percent among other castes. Individuals from scheduled castes are less likely to own land or any productive assets to enable self-employment; they are more likely to depend on casual wage labor for income, resulting in higher levels of underemployment; and, when they are employed, they receive lower average wages that their non–SC counterparts.
Historically, in addition to being excluded from property rights, SCs have also been denied rights to education.
High dropout rates, poor-quality education, and discrimination in education are some of the problems children from scheduled castes have faced. As a result, there are large gaps in literacy rates and education levels between children of SCs and those of other castes.
(The following part is more relevant for now. So keep your eyes peeled)
The government’s approach draws mainly from provisions of equality for SCs laid out in the constitution and is influenced by two considerations:
to overcome the multiple deprivations that SCs inherited from their past exclusion, and to provide protection against ongoing exclusion and discrimination.
The result is a twofold strategy as follows:
1. Anti-discriminatory or protective measures. The Protection of Civil Rights Act (1955) and Prevention of Atrocities Act (1989) outlawed “untouchability” and other forms of discrimination in public places or in the provision of public services and provided legal protection to SCs in the event of acts perpetrated against them by higher castes. The practice of reservations in government services, state-supported educational institutions, and various democratic bodies also falls under this category. Reservations are used by the government to ensure proportional participation of SCs in public spheres.
2. Developmental and empowerment measures. In the absence of legal affirmative action policy in the private sector, the State has used general programs to promote economic, educational, and social empowerment for SCs.
These programs have been primarily undertaken as a part of anti-poverty programs that target or fix specific quotas for SCs where possible, as follows:
- Measures for economic empowerment include improving the ownership of capital assets; enhancing the business capabilities and skills of SC members; distributing surplus land to landless households; subsidizing credit and input provision to SC households; providing employment generation schemes to address the lack of employment opportunities in the lean season; and providing programs to support the release and rehabilitation of bonded laborers, given that SCs constitute about 61 percent of bonded laborers in India.
- Educational development programs comprise about half of the central government’s spending on SCs. These programs include improvements in educational infrastructure in areas predominantly populated by SCs; admission to educational institutions through quotas and other measures; financial support for education at various levels; remedial coaching; and special hostels for boys and girls from SCs. Under all of these schemes, girls are given particular attention.
- Additional schemes focus on improving SC access to civic amenities like drinking water, housing, sanitation, electricity, roads, and public food distribution, since SCs often live in segregated residential areas with unequal access to these civic amenities.
To summarize the above:
Social discrimination in the name of caste, results in not just social backwardness, i.e inadequate representation in the society, but economic backwardness as well – arising directly and indirectly from the social discrimination. In other words, for the SC/ST/OBC, in addition to the usual causes, one major cause of their economic backwardness is social backwardness resulting from social discrimination, which is unique to these groups. Thus, for the SC/ST/OBC, social discrimination is first cause of economic backwardness.
*i180.photobucket.com/albums/x31/trash609/1.jpg
If the govt. concentrated only on the aspect of economic backwardness, then three important pieces of the puzzle would remain unaddressed. “Social discrimination”, “social backwardness” arising out of social discrimination (both of past and current) and “economic backwardness” arising out of such social discrimination. Since, the social discrimination and the resulting backwardness remain unaddressed, the resultant economic backwardness would continue to exist, even though, by some miracle, all the “other causes” are somehow removed.
This in turn means, that the disparity between the general caste and the lower caste, will continue to exist, both from social point of view as well as economic point of view. The govt. therefore adopts two fold policy to meat these three aspects:
Social discrimination: through enactment of laws (although, implementation leaves a hell of a lot to be desired) and this is primarily to address current discrimination.
Social backwardness: through reservation on the basis of caste, to ensure, greater representation of the backward community in the society and primarily, to undo the consequences of social discrimination in the past.
Economic backwardness: through numerous poverty eradication programs and sops, e.g. free education, mid day meal, subsidizing higher education, enabling soft loans to the unemployed etc.
This should explain the theoretical part of why reservation on the basis of caste is preferred over economic criterion. Because, only this form of reservation can address the social issue, which is, in any case the primary objective of caste based reservation. Reservation on economic criteria can’t address the economic backwardness that arises from social issues.
Gang – Sen – Yun in their paper “Was Mandal Commission right” argue that for the OBC, it is the lack of education that has resulted in their low standard of living, while for SC, it is the type of work they do, and for ST, it is the location. They however reach a conclusion that “the Mandal Commission may have been partly right and partly wrong in its recommendations: while
seat reservations in educational institutions may help to some extent in reducing the difference in living standards between the Other Backward Classes and the mainstream population, it is less certain that job quotas will contribute to the same extent.”
In order to understand the issue with backward class, I suggest you read “Indentifying OBC” by Ramaiah.
The argument that the existence of the rich/middle class, falsifies the idea that discrimination is based on caste, is itself a riddled with fallacy. It assumes that money is the source of discrimination and not caste. The above arguments negate that premise.
In view of the above, let me redraft your simple equation: (ugh..no stike through. The underlined part is relevant and the non-underlined part irrelevant)
Poor SC/ST/OBC -> Come under reservation based on caste as well as economic condition
Rich SC/ST/OBC -> Come under reservation base on caste only
Poor non SC/ST/OBC -> Come under reservation based on economic condition only.
Rich non SC/ST/OBC -> Dont come under any type of reservation
<Non SC/ST/OBC do not need any reservation, because the affirmative action in form of reservation is not a poverty alleviation program, but a social upliftment program>
Categories which need reservation
1. Poor
SC/ST/OBC
2. Poor non SC/ST/OBC
Categories which don't need reservation
1. Rich SC/ST/OBC (doesnt matter if they exist or not since they dont need it)
2. Rich
non SC/ST/OBC
Schemes which cover the categories which need reservation
->
Reservation based on economic condition
caste
Consequences of using a caste based reservation scheme
1.
Poor SC/ST/OBC get reservation
2.
Rich SC/ST/OBC get reservation and use most of it. (dont need)
(collateral)
3. Poor non SC/ST/OBC dont get reservation (need)
<Nope. Purpose of reservation is not to alleviate the poor, but to alleviate the one's who are socially backward
4. Rich non SC/ST/OBC dont get reservation.
Another logic regarding social discrimination
1.
People dont let the poor
SC/ST/OBC study.
2. People cant do anything to rich SC/ST/OBC (doesnt matter if they exist or not)
3.
People let the poor
SC/ST/OBC study because of reservation only
4.
people wont let them study if reservation based on caste does not exist.
5. Now tell me why wont they let the same SC/ST/OBC study if they are still getting reservation under economic condition.
< There is no one word/sentence answer to it. The above paragraphs should explain some parts of it.
6. Why are the people letting SC/ST/OBC study till 12th only and what happen only at the time of higher education study?
< The dynamics are different at this level. I have probably explained it in one of my earlier posts> He is going to leave his house to study in the city anyway.
Having rich SC/ST/OBC also reduces the number of poor SC/ST/OBC to get the reservation but you wouldnt mind since you are hell bent of destroying India at any cost.
…because I am a paid ISI/CIA double agent. Shhhhhhh…don’t tell it to anybody.
The problem can be solved by creating new institutions with the help of private companies…
Do not disagree.
…helping the SC/ST/OBC in some way to gain status and money(isnt this the whole point of reservation?)
No. And this is where you and all who try to push economic criteria as the basis, are wrong.
Is the fastest way the best way all the time?
Strawman
You are simply taking something from one person and giving it to another.
Amazing. For generations continue oppression, then when its time to give them a helping hand, out comes the accusation of “taking something from one person and giving it to another.” That’s despicable. This is what is called elitism, and no, I don’t need on one to teach me what it is.
Wouldnt it be better if both have it? Even if both can have it, why will you choose a way only one person can have it? And please dont tell me there isnt a way both can have the same thing.
Not where resource is limited.
I think the main problem here is you are trying to achieve a different goal than i am trying to achieve. If i go by my way, i will achieve my goal. If you go by your way, you will achieve your goal. So i think i am right and you think you are right too.
This defeats the whole purpose of having a debate since we are not having the debate to achieve the same goal. As long as this is the case, there is now way a conclusion can be reached.
I am trying to fill a half filled glass, and you are trying to drain what is already there. Yes our goals are different, but apparently, the world thinks my goal is the correct one. How about that.
Oh thank you for ruining my evening by sending me on a wild goose chase.