ToI's Analysis of Medical College Admissions in 2017

I am not thrilled to see the word "merit" being used so casually, but Rema Nagarajan's ToI news story captures the essence in its title: Money, not quota, dilutes merit in medical admissions:

It is not caste-based reservation but money that compromises merit in medical admissions.

This is obvious from the difference of about 140 marks, or close to 20 percentage points, between the average NEET scores of admissions to over 39,000 government-controlled seats and those to the over 17,000 management and NRI quota seats in private colleges where fees determine admission.

TOI analysed details of nearly 57,000 students admitted to 409 colleges last year. The average NEET score of students in government-controlled seats was 448 out of 720, while the quotas under private control averaged just 306.

Incidentally, the average score of students admitted under the SC quota in government colleges was 398 and the overall average for SC students in all colleges was 367, both much higher than the overall average for privately controlled seats.

#StandWithJNU

These are depressingly bad times for higher ed institutions in India. If administrators were the victims of authoritarian excess in iconic institutions such as IIT-D and ISI-Kolkata, they also seem to be complicit in dishing it out to students at other iconic institutions such as IIT-M, University of Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru University. Politicians (even "responsible" ones such as central ministers) and news anchors throw the "anti-national" mud indiscriminately at students [sometimes with such epic ineptitude -- which would be funny if only lives and reputations were not at stake]. Kafila and Smoke Signals [Prem Panicker's blog] have been my go-to places for updates on the terrible travesty that has been playing out in Delhi and elsewhere in the country.

These troubled times also offer an opportunity to learn more about nationalism and its discontents (one of whom is a Bharat Ratna!). Also about dissent, free speech, their limits. And about universities, their mission. Here are some links that have educated me on these and related issues.

1. Siddharth Varadarajan: On Kanhaiya: It is Time to Stand Up and Be Counted.

2. Sangeeta Dasgupta: Umar Khalid, My Student.

3. Amitava Kumar: Hounding students is pest control? Big ‘mishtake’.

4. Christina Daniels' response to a speech by HRD Minister in the Lok Sabha. It includes a punchy quote [“Politicians are not born; they are excreted.”] and an insightful one [“Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.”] -- both from Cicero!

5. And a totally doctored video featuring Kanhaiya Kumar.

Some more:

1. C.P. Surendran: India will pay for Arnab Goswami and Swapan Dasgupta's nationalism.

2. Gopalkrishna Gandhi: In Defence of Mother India, Students’ Movement Takes Charge.

3. Tunku Varadarajan: Reverse Swing: The BJP versus the jholawala.

4. Lawrence Liang: Ultra-nationalists make light of patriotism. Here's an excerpt where he quotes Mahatma Gandhi:

   In contrast to the knee-jerk declaration that any criticism of the government or the state is necessarily seditious speech, let’s not forget that Mahatma Gandhi had been tried under the same provision (Sec. 124-A) in 1921 for an article that he had published in Young India. In his statement on March 18, 1922 before Judge Broomfield, Gandhiji famously asserted: “Section 124-A, under which I am happily charged, is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite violence.”

   Gandhi was prescient in his sharp legal understanding of the provision and it is not surprising that his interpretation of the law is what the Supreme Court in the postcolonial context has also reiterated, consistently holding that mere words and criticism do not qualify for sedition and it has to be accompanied by an incitement to imminent violence. [...]

13,602

That's the number of 16-18 year-olds who learned today that they are actually world-class, a privilege that allows all of them (and actually goads some of them) to live a life filled with a sense of entitlement and utter disdain for mere mortals -- especially their teachers. The press release is here.

* * *

Some highlights:

1. "A total number of 4,68,240 candidates appeared in JEE-2011 ... 13,602 candidates have been declared qualified to seek admission for 9618 seats in the IITs."

   Thus, about 3 percent of the candidates qualified. This figure is as high as ~5 percent for the Madras zone. I guess there's a lot of celebration at Hyderabad, which has probably overtaken Kota, Rajasthan, as the city of JEE dreams.

2. "This year 108647 girls appeared for JEE-2011 out of which 1491 qualified."

   There are several ways to see this result. First, the fraction of girls who qualified is 1.4 %, which is less than half the overall figure of about 3 %. Second, and more tellingly, boys are about two-and-a-half times more likely to be among the rank-holders than girls (3.36 % for boys against 1.34 % for girls).

   Third, girls form about 11 percent of rank-holders, while their share among the exam-takers was 23%.

3. In the OBC category, 138,104 took the exam, and 2700 qualified -- a ratio of about 2 %. A more relevant figure is the fraction of OBC students among the JEE-qualified: about 20%. While this figure is better than those of the previous two years (19% and 18%), it is still far short of the 27 percent supposedly set aside for them.

4. In the SC category, 45172 students took the exam and 1966 qualified -- yielding a pretty fabulous (by JEE standards) ratio of 4.3%.

   This also means that the SC quota has been filled to the brim. This is the second time that this key mark of progress has been achieved.

5. In the ST category, 766 students qualified out of 18125 -- for a ratio of 4.2 % which, while impressive, still doesn't allow them to fill all the available seats (mainly because their share in the group of exam-takers is low: 3.9 % which is about half as much as their quota.

6. The PD category is special: over 19 % of the PD candidates qualified (440 out of 2286); since their number among exam-takers is small, this huge pass-through ratio is still not enough to enable them to fill all the available seats.

More later, when the IITs release detailed information.

Links ...

1. Lawrence Krause in WSJ: The Lies Of Science Writing

2. Claudio Vita-Finzi in TLS: Galileo's explosive life and legacy

3. Pallavi Singh in Mint: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurship

4. Let's end this list with a golden oldie from The Onion: 'I Am Under 18' Button Clicked For First Time In History Of Internet

Science in India: "Quantity need not mean a loss in quality"

The Nature India portal features an interesting column -- The Quality - Quantity Conundrum -- by two colleagues of mine, Prof. Gautam Desiraju and Prof. M. Giridhar. [Note: the site requires (free) registration.] Here's a quick excerpt:

An earlier analysis on the contributions of the best 10 research institutions in these countries to their overall publication records showed that the premier Indian institutes contributed nearly 30% over the span of 25 years. This is in keeping with the sluggish Indian curve in figure 1. However, in China, the contribution of the top institutes has decreased from 53% to 39% during the period of 2002 to 2008, which coincides with the exponential overall growth in that country. Clearly this means that the second and third rung research institutes have begun to participate actively in research. This can only be possible if trained manpower who studied in the top institutes went on to teach and do research in these institutes.

* * *

While much of their analysis is admirably data-driven, I wish they didn't take a loose, evidence-free swipe at the reservation policy:

There is also a real need now to assess the consequences of the caste based reservation system. Where has 50 years of reservation taken us, in a world where no quotas are applied in competitive activity?

The issue may appear in the form of a hard-nosed question about the consequences of reservation, but this sort of rhetoric is intellectually lazy -- as lazy, in fact, as that flowing in the opposite direction: where has 60+ years of upper caste domination of higher education and scientific research taken us?

Fifty percent limit on reservations

Looks like this arbitrary, nationwide limit is now history:

The Supreme Court today virtually lifted its 50 per cent cap on job and education quotas, allowing Tamil Nadu to exceed the volume if “quantifiable data” justified it.

The order implies that any state can now do a headcount of all groups it deems backward, place the numbers before the state backward commission, secure its recommendation for higher or additional quotas, and pass a law implementing them. Such higher quotas can no longer be legally challenged for exceeding the 50 per cent ceiling but only on other grounds, such as a faulty headcount.

Here's what this ruling implies for the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka:

The quota volume in [Tamil Nadu] can, therefore, rise even above the existing 69 per cent if the data justify it. Tamil Nadu would ideally like 88 per cent reservations.

Neighbouring Karnataka, which had enacted a 50 per cent quota for the Other Backward Classes in addition to 23 per cent for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes — raising the total to 73 per cent — too has been allowed the same leeway.

Till a year from today, the quota volume in Karnataka will stay at 50 per cent, but the state can within that period do a survey of backward communities. If its backward commission then accepts that the data justify a hike to 73 per cent or higher, the state can pass a law to that effect.

Karnataka wants 57 per cent reservation for the Other Backward Classes alone, which means a total quota volume of 80 per cent.

Links

1. Prem Panicker at FTP: Fit To Post: Spell i-n-c-r-e-d-i-b-l-e:

   I think it was at that moment that I realized why a competition for pre- and early-teen kids spelling words the rest of us have never heard in our lives was being telecast on the premier sports channel: this was sport, at its finest. The preparatory work these kids do is analogous to the cricketer who spends endless hours practicing foot movement with the aid of a ball on a string; the golfer who, immured in his own private space, drives hundreds, even thousands, of balls a day seeking to perfect his swing… And the pressure of competition is just as much: literally millions of kids take part in the regional and state level bees that you have to win to qualify for the grand finals. This year, 273 kids — the highest ever number of contestants in Bee history — have made it to the final stage.

2. My friend and colleague B. Ananthanarayan has an article in Phalanx entitled "Some Issues in 'Doing Science' in India."

   ... [T]he age of stalwarts everywhere in the world is essentially gone. No longer do we have the `Mendeleev' periodic table or the `Gaussian' distribution, or the Dirac equation, and even less the Darwin theory of the Mendel's law. It is worth keeping in mind that the Large Hadron Collider is built by thousands of nameless and faceless, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe project by hundreds of nameless and faceless, and that science today is indeed based on teamwork and is increasingly so. What the role of the individual scientist will be in this scientific environment is hard to say, but the times are exciting as we enter unknown frontiers on a daily basis, on the microscopic as well as the macroscopic, in elementary particle physics on the one hand and cosmology on the other, in biophysics and biochemistry where borders blur everyday.

3. Manoj Mitta at Legal Airs: Why Canada Should Not Have Backed Off On Visa:

   The reason I went into these incredible details about the 1984 massacre is to give you a sense of how that episode in our history has become a benchmark of impunity. Nobody can be faulted for believing that if India had rendered justice to the victims of 1984, it would have perhaps been spared the trauma of further sectarian violence in 1992, 2002 and 2008. The casualties of these subsequent events were largely Muslims and Christians, a fact underlying the common interest that lies in grappling with this monster of impunity.

4. Gulzar Natarajan at Urbanomics: Discrimination and the Economics of Life.

5. One of the papers discussed in Gulzar's post reminded me of a study done by Sukhdeo Thorat and Paul Attewell: The Legacy of Social Exclusion. You need a subscription to read that paper, but you can find the abstract and a few excerpts in this post.

JEE-2010: How well did the OBCs do?

Not very well, seems to be the verdict. Even though 2,357 of them qualified, that number is 210 short of 2,567 seats (27% of 9,509 seats overall) reserved for them. Thus, those extra seats will now go to the general category.

This year marks the third and final stage of OBC reservation -- bringing the total to the full 27%. The quota policy at IITs doesn't work like it does in other institutions: IITs use a cut-off for the reserved categories: for OBC candidates, it's 10% less than the general category cut-off, and for SC and ST, it's 50%.

It turns out that 11.3% (or, 1,489) of the students in the Common Merit List are from OBC -- these are the students who did not need the relaxation in the cut-off. This figure was close to 14 % (~1400) last year.

The share of OBCs among the JEE-qualified candidates (13,104) stands at just under 18%, less than the 2009 figure of 19%.

This is roughly in line with what I said last year:

Out of 1930 students who make it to the OBC list, about 1400 would have made it to the common list without needing a relaxed cut-off. In other words, 14% of the available seats would have gone to the OBC students anyway; this figure was the same last year [2008] too. Thus, a relaxation of 10% in the cut-off marks (both at the subject level and in the aggregate) gets OBCs only an additional 500 seats (or, 5% additional seats).

And here's the thing: the IITs will probably keep this relaxation in cut-off marks at 10%. If the ratio (10% relaxation to 5% additional OBC seats) holds, this would imply that OBCs' share of IIT seats will settle at about 19-20%, and that this share can go up only if the OBCs get into the common pool in greater numbers. [Bold emphasis added].

In the event, OBCs have a smaller share of the common pool this year; as a consequence, they have been unable to fill the seats reserved for them.

JEE-2010

Some quick comments. First, some groups that have done extremely well to reach major milestones:

1. SC Students have managed to fill all the seats (and then some) reserved for them. For the first time.

2. Andhra Pradesh: First and second rankers are from AP, which is also the home of seven among the top ten. The state has scored in other ways too:

   Students from the state also scored well in the reserved category. In the OBC category , AP bagged seven out of the top 15 ranks. Among all reserved categories, including SC, ST, OBC and Physically Handicapped (PH), the state secured over 50 ranks in the top 200.

   Officials from IIT-Madras said that students from AP already account for 21 per cent of the total strength in IITs.

   [Be careful with that ToI report, though: it has howlers like, "An estimated 30 per cent of the 50,000 students who wrote the exam from the state cleared the test this year." If these numbers are correct, AP alone would account for 15,000 of the 13,104 ranks!]

3. Hindi speakers: The number of JEE rankers who took the exam in Hindi tripled to 554 from 184 last year -- despite the problems that plagued the Hindi paper this year. [See items 2 and 3 in the corrective steps taken by the IITs].

Some other interesting bits:

1. JEE-2010 was taken by 4,55,571 students, up 18% from JEE-2009's 3,84,977.

2. The number of JEE-qualified candidates has gone up 30% to 13,104 from 10,048.

   [Not all of them can demand a seat at an IIT (or JEE affiliates), however. The number of IIT seats is only 9,509 this year.]

3. This year, 1476 girls have qualified, an increase of over 40 percent over last year's 1048. Girls' share in the exam takers also increased 15% from 98,028 to 1,13,127, and Their success rate went up from 1.06% to 1.3 %. So, this is a clear gain for girls.

4. Akansha Sarda is the topper among girls -- with a rank of 18. She's not joining an IIT, however; she's going to MIT.

5. Sahal Kaushik of Delhi at No. 33 is just 14 years old, and home-schooled. And, what does he want to study? "I want to study pure science, physics or mathematics, not engineering. ... I took the JEE because I could also get science courses through it."

6. Anand Kumar's Super 30 achieves 100% success -- for the third time in a row. [An ally-turned-rival has raised some questions about this institution's record, however.]

Caste Census

Three links.

In the first, Pratap Bhanu Mehta goes ballistic in opposing the very idea of a caste census. Scratch the surface a little bit, and you too would wonder how much of his opposition is driven by an almost visceral hatred towards the so-called OBC politics:

Third, giving in to a caste census is giving in to a discourse of raw political power. The blunt truth is that designing remedial measures for Dalits, including addressing discrimination does not require a census. This demand has rather been fuelled by politically assertive groups like OBCs, who first hijacked the Dalit discourse on deprivation to their own ends.

Nandini Sundar, on the other hand, goes into the question of whether a caste census can do anything to reduce inequality, and concludes:

... [W]hile the census can provide base figures, it cannot substitute for the kind of information needed both for inclusion of castes in an OBC list or for ‘graduation' of castes out of the list, even assuming the latter were ever to be politically feasible.

In the meantime, Amitabh Bachchan knows what he will say when the census enumerator asks for his caste: Indian.

Art of the Possible: The Curious Case of the Caste Census

The caste census is (most likely) on! Let's hope the formal decision will be announced soon.

To see the significance of this (impending) decision, we need to jiggle our neurons and go back to 2006 -- to the height of the OBC reservation debate.

The more wonkish of the opponents of the reservation policy kept questioning the Mandal Commission's estimate of 52 % for the OBC share in the population. They kept hammering away at the fact that the last caste census happened way back in 1931 -- almost four generations ago! They kept denying the validity of caste data from surveys such as the National Sample Survey.

They kept claiming that the economic and educational situation of OBCs is not so 'backward' as to require affirmative action. [Specifics in 2006-08 era posts, especially those under the category Caste]

Most importantly, they kept pounding into us that the OBC share in the population was quite likely far smaller than what the government claimed.

Since a caste census would prove them right, they kept insinuating that it would be killed by a pliant government too scared to take on the "OBC leaders" who would surely oppose it.

Guess what?

[In the Lok Sabha debate,] Sharad Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad — all OBC leaders — warned the Centre against committing the blunder of omitting caste. The Bahujan Samaj Party, Biju Janata Dal, Telugu Desam Party, Trinamul Congress, DMK, CPM, CPI, ADMK, NCP, Akali Dal, Shiv Sena and the Janata Dal (Secular) unambiguously supported caste enumeration.

In the two major national parties, the initial response to the demand for caste census was not so much as to oppose it, but to side-step it and hope that it would go away. BJP chose to focus on Bangladeshi 'infiltrators', before outraged leaders like Gopinath Munde forced its hand.

The Congress too has its own supporters of caste census [see this report for a summary of the Lok Sabha debate]; but in a Cabinet meeting, they were sidelined:

At Tuesday's Cabinet meeting, Home Minister P. Chidambaram, whose Ministry oversees the census, argued against the demand to include caste. He said the enumerators lacked the sociological sensitivity to record and classify the population on the basis of caste and sub-caste. According to sources, he suggested that the backward classes commissions at the State and Central levels be better placed to conduct a detailed survey. Others not inclined towards a caste census were Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal.

The Natural Party of Governance appears to have come around to accepting caste census. And this is indeed good news.

It's not done, yet. So, let's wait for the official announcement before hailing it as an example of politics that works.

Links ...

1. Development economist Esther Duflo of MIT wins this year's John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association. She's the second woman to win this Medal. Here's her home page. [Hat Tip: Amol Agrawal and Swarup].

   Quite a bit of her work at The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) -- which she co-founded with Infosys Prize (2009) winner Abhijit Banerjee (MIT) and Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard) -- has been done in India. Here's an excerpt from the NYTimes story:

   One of her own recent studies looked at how quota systems for female politicians affected Indian attitudes toward female leadership. [Another paper] looked at ways to motivate teachers to have better attendance at Indian schools ...

2. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in NYTimes: How to end the slavery blame game:

   While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers [...], there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

   [...] In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be. In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.

3. Ask Dr. Free-Ride: Ethically, which field of science is the worst? Not surprisingly, there is no clear answer, but just look at the links in that post! They contain a short history of scientific skullduggery, misconduct and fraud.

JNU and Reservations

It's sad to read Anuradha Raman's Outlook story on the ongoing 'debate' within JNU on faculty reservations:

Given [Vice Chancellor] Bhattacharya’s ambivalence on reservation -— amply demonstrated, faculty members say, in two meetings of the academic council and the last executive council meeting of April 6—many at the university think his continuance will thwart any effort to introduce reservations in the faculty. In fact, the meeting of the executive council—the highest body in the university—was marked by a vicious debate. It was even decided to refer the matter to the solicitor-general of India, prompting executive council member P. Sainath to ask why the highest legal officer of the country should opine on the administrative matters of a university, especially when the university had submitted to the Supreme Court in 2008 that it would implement faculty quotas in two years.

Dalits and the Free Market

Caste is feudal, the market free and equal. Correct? Ask Ratan Lal Sirswal or Deepak Jatav.

Sirswal, 75, had started off as a sweeper but is now one of the oldest businessmen in Panipat, Haryana. He quit his sweeper’s job once his handloom unit was on its feet. His success, he says, came largely because he hid the fact that he was born a Valmiki Dalit.

Customers who discovered his caste origins shunned him. Banks would not give loans because caste matters to them too, and Dalit entrepreneurs are too few and far between to work the system as a group like the upper castes do.

From Dalit is a Dalit even in a ‘free’ market, a Telegraph story by Radhika Ramaseshan.

Links ...

1. Annie Murphy Paul in NYTimes: How to be Brilliant [a review of The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong by David Shenk]:

   Shenk doesn’t neglect the take-home point we’re all waiting for, even titling a chapter “How to Be a Genius (or Merely Great).” The answer has less in common with the bromides of motivational speakers than with the old saw about how to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. Whatever you wish to do well, Shenk writes, you must do over and over again, in a manner involving, as Ericsson put it, “repeated attempts to reach beyond one’s current level,” which results in “frequent failures.” This is known as “deliberate practice,” and over time it can actually produce changes in the brain, making new heights of achievement possible. Behold our long rumored potential, unleashed at last! Shenk is vague about how, exactly, this happens, but to his credit he doesn’t make it sound easy. “You have to want it, want it so bad you will never give up, so bad that you are ready to sacrifice time, money, sleep, friendships, even your reputation,” he writes. “You will have to adopt a particular lifestyle of ambition, not just for a few weeks or months but for years and years and years. You have to want it so bad that you are not only ready to fail, but you actually want to experience failure: revel in it, learn from it.”

2. Vikram at An Academic View of India: The Three Roles of Caste in Indian Society.

   The third and I believe, most important role is caste as a determinant of social relationships and human behaviour. This affects Indians of almost all caste, religions and language, except the hill people of North East and Central India. The hierarchical, ‘purity’ bound social order has been embedded in the behaviour of Indians for generations and overcoming it will take generations. Indians, urban or rural usually work on a master slave nature of personal relationships. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out in ‘The Burden of Democracy’, Indians often fail to see their co-workers, bosses, employees etc. as equal human beings, being constantly aware of one’s ’status’ with respect to the other. One has to work hard and be well off, not simply for material fulfillment, but for expecting the minimum civility and respect that should be accorded to every human. The socio-religious capital of being a Brahmin or a big land-owner has been replaced by financial capital and the social capital of ‘being well known’, ‘working in an MNC’ or ‘having studied abroad’.

3. I Want 5 Sentences, Not 'War and Peace': An interview of Guy Kawasaki by NYTimes's Adam Bryant.

   Q. Talk more about this notion of dispensability.

   A. Insecure people would rather see the company fail without them than succeed. It’s because their ego is so large that the thought of a company succeeding without them is incomprehensible. They would rather see it fail.

4. Mikhail Gorbachev: Perestroika Lost. You should read it for the title alone!

Reservations and JNU faculty

It was quite shocking that a bunch of JNU faculty members resorted to the same cliched arguments against reservations at the faculty level -- especially at the full professor level.

That was two weeks ago.

Now, in a welcome move, quite a few of them have backtracked from their earlier stand.

As for the official stand, this is what the Vice-Chancellor B.B. Bhattacharya had to say:

... [T]he university was in the process of furnishing its response to the query. “We have to first get a clarification on whether reservations in the academic faculty is a law; if so, we won’t go against it.”

While this seems to me like a strange thing to say, I hope he finds the time to figure out the right thing to do, and do it.

MIT's Report on Faculty Race and Diversity

This seems like a major event at MIT. I don't have the time to go through it right now, but I'll link to the report, as well as to some immediate comments from others.

1. MIT News: MIT releases report on minority faculty. The Report On The Initiative for Faculty Race and Diversity is here.

2. Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed has a story on MIT's report: Race and Merit at MIT.

Links ...

1. After one Rao (CNR, in 2005), it's time for another: C.R. Rao Bags India Science Award.

2. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's speech at the 2010 Indian Science Congress at Thiruvananthapuram. You are better off reading a summary in The Hindu or The Telegraph (by T.V. Jayan).

3. Citara Paul in The Telegraph: Call for First Caste Census:

   India may next year witness its first census since Independence that refers to caste, if the Centre accepts a social justice ministry recommendation that could be politically controversial.

   Officials said the ministry had asked for caste to be included as one of the criteria in the 2011 census, and recommended a differential headcount of the Other Backward Classes and reassessment of their conditions that could lead to changes in the OBC list.

   Here's my view from 2007 supporting the caste census.

4. This 2007 post has relevant links to the academic debate on caste census.

Links ...

1. Affirmative Action for the Future -- an e-mail interview of James P. Sterba, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and author of a recent book with that title.

2. Raymond Tallis: Neurotrash. "From ethics and art history to social policy experts are embracing neuroscience as the answer to understanding human behaviour. Raymond Tallis rallies the neurosceptics."

3. Colin Pantall's cartoons: Great Author Considers His Response, and Blogger Considers His Response.

Links ...

1. Lani Guinier and Susan Sturm in Forbes: America's Best Colleges: Merit By The Numbers [via The Situationist Blog].

   The preoccupation with backwards-looking statistical criteria also severs the tie between admissions and mission. The testing regime deflects the college's responsibility away from, for example, producing a diverse and dynamic learning environment that actually builds capacity among the students to become the leaders, thinkers and entrepreneurs of the next generation. Reputation based on numerical ranking assumes greater importance than reputation based on the development of innovative ideas and publicly spirited graduates. The primary function of admission becomes status and prestige enhancement for the institution itself and for those who enroll.

2. Jyoti Punwani in The Hoot: Caste Matters (covering something that I noted a few days ago):

   The Times’ recent report isn’t unusual; the paper has been consistently running down the performance of reserved category IIT aspirants and students. Journalists can end up perpetuating stereotypes that stigmatize an entire community.

3. Sharon Begley in Newsweek: Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?

   These have not been easy days for evolutionary psychology. For years the loudest critics have been social scientists, feminists and liberals offended by the argument that humans are preprogrammed to rape, to kill unfaithful girlfriends and the like. (This was a reprise of the bitter sociobiology debates of the 1970s and 1980s. When Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson proposed that there exists a biologically based human nature, and that it included such traits as militarism and male domination of women, left-wing activists—including eminent biologists in his own department—assailed it as an attempt "to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex" analogous to the scientific justification for Nazi eugenics.) [...]

   That is changing. Evo psych took its first big hit in 2005, when NIU's Buller exposed flaw after fatal flaw in key studies underlying its claims, as he laid out in his book Adapting Minds. Anthropological studies such as Hill's on the Ache, shooting down the programmed-to-rape idea, have been accumulating. And brain scientists have pointed out that there is no evidence our gray matter is organized the way evo psych claims, with hundreds of specialized, preprogrammed modules. Neuroscientist Roger Bingham of the University of California, San Diego, who describes himself as a once devout "member of the Church of Evolutionary Psychology" (in 1996 he created and hosted a multimillion-dollar PBS series praising the field), has come out foursquare against it, accusing some of its adherents of an "evangelical" fervor. Says evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci of Stony Brook University, "Evolutionary stories of human behavior make for a good narrative, but not good science."