The need for hard data

It's becoming increasingly clear that the government did virtually no spadework before deciding on quotas in central educational institutions. There is, for instance, no reliable evidence on the proportion of students from among the OBCs currently enrolled in these institutions. An ET-NCAER analysis of data thrown up by the 55th round of the NSS has unearthed a wealth of information on economic and educational status of India’s OBCs. The data is rich in detail and would help in the formulation of rigorous criteria to determine policies for more equitable access to education. OBCs as a whole are, clearly, worse off than the general category, but the top 20% of the former are not very much behind the same segment of the general category in per capita consumption. The gap widens for the middle layers, but narrows again for the bottom 20%. There’s considerable gap in access to education, though. The data shows that only 8.8% of the top 20% of the OBCs have access to higher education as opposed to 18% of the same segment among the general category. The same analysis has shown that the top 20% among OBCs are either ahead of, or virtually on par with the top 20% among upper castes at the elementary, middle and higher-secondary levels.
The data may appear to support the case for OBC quotas in institutions of higher learning. However, as we have argued, quotas are not the right instrumentality for redressing disparities, vis-a-vis access to higher education. Central educational institutions are a source of competitive strength for India in the knowledge economy. Equity as a policy objective must be balanced against the need to maintain this source of excellence. Once the quality of government schooling improves, the diversity of the student population in these institutions will doubtless approximate to the general population. Meanwhile, the government should universalise the JNU model, which awards booster points for various orders of backwardness to admission-seekers. That would have the same intended outcome as quotas without granting caste institutional legitimacy.

-- The Economic Times Editorial