Tuesday, April 11, 2006

More on reservation


Just a bunch of links here. With the government committed to examining the current proposal (to allow 27 % reservation in central universities, IITs and IIMs) only after the elections to the state legislatures are over in May, the reservation issue is on the back burner.

Let me start with Dilip D'Souza, who has two posts: the first one makes a case for reservation, by asking you to consider it as something that "give[s] more people greater access to opportunity than they have had." And, the second post takes up the arguments -- most of which are bogus -- that are used in mainstream media against reservations.

Over at Education in India, Satya retraces the recent history of legislation under which the current proposal has been made. The main event, of course, is the passage of the 104th Constitution Amendment Bill.

All political parties without exception were unhappy with the Supreme Court's recent judgement in the P.A. Inamdar case and there was a consensus among all political parties for amending the Constitution to impose the State's reservation policies on the private unaided colleges too.

The Government reacted very quickly. The Minister for Human Resource Development, Arjun Singh, drafted and piloted the 104th Constitution Amendment Bill which was passed in the Lok Sabha on December 21st with 379 votes in favour and one vote against and one abstaining. The Rajya Sabha also passed it on December 22nd with 172 votes in favour and only two against.

Fron Satya's second post, we get a link to this column by Sudhir Krishnaswamy, exploring the question of whether this Amendment will withstand Supreme Court scrutiny.

The Hindu, in its editorial today, argues against reservation in IITs and IIMs. The key argument is the following:

Affirmative action and reservations do involve a lowering of the bar in the admissions process, and there are certain areas such as the defence services and higher specialities in medicine and engineering where it has always been recognised that academic merit alone should count to the exclusion of all other criteria. The IITs and the IIMs certainly belong to this critically important category ...

The Economic Times, too, argues against the quota system in an editorial titled "No More Quotas". It talks about how positive actions (interventions) by the government are needed to redress discrimination and inequality, it feels that the current proposal is not good. Without giving any evidence, it makes the following assertions:

These quotas will do less than justice to both the class of intended beneficiaries and the class of employers who hire those coming out of our educational system, besides harming the interests of those like Muslims, who are outside the ambit both of traditional preference in hiring and of state-sponsored quotas.

10 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    hi,
    Come join us to raise the voice against reservation.
    logonto : wwww.voiceagainstreservation.blogspot.com
    regards,
    sainathkm

  2. Anonymous said...

    Abi:

    The main problem is IIT seats remaining unfilled. For example, last year 1.98 lakh students appeared for IIT-JEE for 4,935 available seats. Since only 1/3rd of the students under reserved category joined, 800 seats remained vacant for ever, while thousands scramle to get admission. It included 180 vacant seats at IT-BHU, 150 at IIT-KGP and over 100 each at some of the IITs.

    Govt. states that OBC quota will be in effect at IITs only in next year and general category will not suffer as the loss will be made up by increasing total seats at all IITs. Let us do the maths. Apart from 3% reserved seats for Physically Handicapped (which is desirable but is hardly used, and hence not counted towards quota), 15% for SC, 7.5% for SC and now 27% OBC. Suppose IIT admits 100 students this year, with 77.5 students (100-22.5) in genral category. To keep the same number of seats for general category next year, when GC can have only 50.5% of seats, the total seats should be increased to 153.5 next year. Assuming that similar to SC & ST, the OBC category also fill up to only 1/3 (i.e. 2/3 vacant), the total vacant positions shall be (153.5 * 0.495)* (2/3) = 50.5 seats vacant out of 153.5 total seats.

    This year 3.00 lakh students appeared for IIT-JEE for about 6,000 seats at IITs, IT-BHU and ISM-Dhanabad (ignoring for IISCER, which is only for this year). It includes GC seats of 6,000 * 0.775 = 4,650 this year. To make same number of seats available for GC students, the total seats must be increased to 4,650/0.505 = 9,200 next year. The vacant seats (due to sufficient number of students in ST, SC and OBC are non-available)= (9,200 * 0.495) * (2/3) = 3,000 seats!

    Thus on the paper, the screaming headlines will be "4.00 lakh students appeared for IIT-JEE 2007 exam for 9,200 available seats", in reality they appeared for 6,200 seats, with a passing ratio of only 1.5%!

    Thanks,

    Yogesh Upadhyaya
    New Jersey, USA

  3. Anonymous said...

    Hi Yogesh ,I am not sure if you know exactly how the 2/3rd seats end up being vacant. Please read the previous post by Abi, the links and the comments that followed.

  4. Anonymous said...

    Dear Aswin:

    1) The admission of SC/ST students to IIT is based on lower cut-off marks (2/3rd marks of the lowest marks achieved by the general category (GC) students in previous year's exam). Despite this, many SC/ST students can not get through. For example, for IIT-JEE 2005, as per Indian Express Page One news, IIT-KGP Director SK Dube lamented that over 150 reserved seats remained vacant. Same with my institute IT-BHU, where total seats available were 643 (including GC/ST/SC/PH as 478/97/48/20 seats)but only 499 students joined. There were over 100 seats remained vacant at ISM, Dhanabad and also at other IITs, eexcept at IIT-Bombay. Thus over 800 seats remained vacant out of 4,935 seats, i.e. 15% of the total available seats or more than 2/3 of the reserved seats. The above numbers were arrived after contacting each institute.

    2) Moreover, students in reserved category get opportunity for counselling on the very first day, i.e. along with top 600 AIR students from general category. This gives head-start advantage for reserved category students and they select prime institute (e.g. IIT-Bombay) and prime branch (e.g. Computer Science).

    3)In one of articles in rediff.com about reforms in IIT-JEE exam, I wanted to highlight the fact of vacant seats, but dropped at the last moment, so as not to cause controversy.

    4)It will be difficult for IITs to recruit 50% more faculty by next year, to match increase number of students. The quick solution will be to convert some of the deserving colleges as IITs.

    Thanks,

    Yogesh K. Upadhyaya
    New Jersey, USA

  5. Anonymous said...

    Ok, I guess u misunderstood me. I am currently studying in an iit. I know the procedure to a large extent.

    I dont see any mention of the 'one year preparatory' in your explanation. If u didnt know, some SC/ST students lying between the cut-off-1 (i guess this is the one that u mention) and some other cut-off-2 are taken into the one year preparatory program. This is meant act as bridge course. But, admission to IITs is not assured at the end of one year. This particular aspect has created a lot of controversy. Again, do read abi's prev post,links and comments there.

    And u say,

    Moreover, students in reserved category get opportunity for counselling on the very first day, i.e. along with top 600 AIR students from general category. This gives head-start advantage for reserved category students and they select prime institute (e.g. IIT-Bombay) and prime branch (e.g. Computer Science)

    This is false. The counselling is indeed done on separate days. But, only the choices are collected during counselling. The actual allotment is done later based on just ranks/quota restrictions etc. So, there is no extra advantage in attending counselling on the first day.

  6. Anonymous said...

    Without giving any evidence, it makes the following assertions... Surprising Abi that you should be talking about assertions. There's been no evidence from you.

  7. Abi said...

    Yogesh, Aswin: Thanks for your inputs. Since I know very little about the exact mechanics of how SC/ST reservation works in IITs, I will refrain from commenting on it.

    However, if lots of SC/ST seats are vacant for genuine reasons, I am sure IITs could press for taking more students in the general category. However, if they were to do that, they would first have to be interested in taking more students; I haven't seen any evidence of this interest.

    Shiva: Cut the sarcasm out, will you?

    Sainath: Thanks for the invite. But, no thanks!

  8. Anonymous said...
    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
  9. Anonymous said...

    However, if lots of SC/ST seats are vacant for genuine reasons, I am sure IITs could press for taking more students in the general category. However, if they were to do that, they would first have to be interested in taking more students; I haven't seen any evidence of this interest.

    Abi, not sure what u meant there. I think I did say that I look at the current situation as a violation of that basic constitutional commitment. Why do you think the situation in which IITs ask for general categ students to fill the currently empty seats would be any better?? If anything, it is worse(constitutionally speaking). Not even the 'seats' would be 22.5%. It would be a more blatant violation.

    And, I do not know about the 'interest' to have more students at the higher levels of the admin. But, there are some logistical problems before intake is increased in large numbers. Space crunch, lack of sufficient faculty are part of the problem. For the past few years, we have been using double rooms as triple rooms. In the worst case, insti was forced to have two students in a crampy single room with a dorm-like double bed. (the situation existed in one hostel). The situation in the girls hostel was so bad that even students in their 3rd years werent getting single rooms.
    But, they are now building new hostels(almost over) to have 1600 more students and things will get better.

    But, the faculty issue remains. Most depts dont even have their currently 'sanctioned' strength. And this is inspite of the insti having gone on a recruit-drive in the past few years.

  10. Abi said...

    Aswin: I am not sure I would call the IITs' inability to fill the SC/ST quota a constitutional violation. IITs can only make a certain number of seats available through quotas, and make a good faith effort to fill them. If the quota remains unfilled even then, I wouldn't blame the IITs.

    There could be quite a few reasons for why IITs' SC/ST quota remains unfilled. At least one of the reasons could be the expanded opportunities that SC/ST students have by way of a whole bunch of other colleges, which may not be as great as the IITs, but are good enough. More importantly, some (not all!) of these students may feel that they stand a better chance of doing well in those other colleges, too. So, the 'other college' option is definitely a viable alternative.

    My comment about IITs 'reclaiming' the unfilled seats in the reserved quota is to answer Yogesh's concern. But, don't worry, it's probably not going to happen!