Reservations.

a.k.a Affirmative Action

Reservations are NOT A PROBLEM. If anything, they are an indicator of problems.

TL;DR: It’s pretty much a one line argument. Vertical Reservation is self-correcting if other measures to bridge dis-advantages are working fine.

Ideally, Caste, Religion, Gender, Economic status among others should not have any correlation with Merit. But sadly they do, atleast with our 'test result merit', and that is the problem.

Given we are a huge population and theory of large numbers clearly applies, at a macro level any vertical distinction based on any attribute proportional to the population of people with such attribute should not change the levels of competition within and outside those verticals. If that is happening then we as a society, as a nation state and as a species are failing.

In a state where there is an immense diversity of contexts, and very few opportunities, it is the sacred duty of those in power to model poverty of access due to attributes of Caste, Religion, Gender and Economic Status and create appropriate bridges.

Over an extended period of time, the ratio of those getting access to opportunities and the total number of people for any specific attribute must not vary by an order of magnitude. And if it does, surgical corrective measures like reservation are a necessity, in light of failure of all else.

Merit is not an 'ideal merit'. It's a 'test result merit' based on a 'filter of merit'. We really don't know for sure what attributes would make say the best police officer, but we are managing to create some test merit based on some ideas of aptitude, IQ, knowledge and linguistic skills. So, though 'test result merit' based on our 'merit filters' may be far from 'ideal merit', we without rigorous analysis would never know if all our 'merit filters' are really merit filters or de-merit filters. Every filter of merit we create has a bias and there is an utmost need to undo them.

Tired.
Tidik tidik tadak. (sounds of neck muscles and finger stretch) Back.

Say there are 10,000 amazing opportunities, and 1 billion people fighting for them. On one attribute, could be any - gender, religion, caste, economic status, rural/urban status etc, we filter 200 million out of them and create a vertical 'reservation' of 2000 opportunities for them. Would they become complacent? No. Carving a proportional filter should NOT impact the competition. But if carving out the vertical reservation really ends up dimming competition, then perhaps you have neutralised some obvious/un-obvious unfair advantage that was otherwise working to the disadvantage of this very group. The idea here should not be to remove this vertical reservation because it would create stark perceived injustices in localised contexts, but to work towards discovering the obvious/un-obvious disadvantage that is crushing the competition within this 200 million. It just cannot be that the 200 million do not want the 2000 opportunities, or can't work hard enough towards them, it has to be something beyond what they can do to grab those. And once those obvious/un-obvious disadvantages are removed the vertical reservation itself becomes invisible.

So, there is a need to study marks cut offs in past 'test result merits' for all the major attributes known to correlate with disadvantage, and must be mapped via first principles to the inner-working of the society where they can be fundamentally neutralized, making any vertical reservation what-so-ever useless, and thus not required.

The thing is these attributes that traditionally correlate with disadvantage aren't all mutually exclusive, so we have all permutations. There would be rich rural dalit girls, and there would be poor urban brahmin boys.

The often repeated argument against present day predominant reservation scheme in India is that it is only on just one attribute: caste. Thus the economically advantaged belonging to the traditionally disadvantaged castes end up hogging the opportunities in the vertical reserved for the set of disadvantaged castes. It might not be just this binary combination, people advantageous in some sets of attributes but from traditionally disadvantaged castes may hog up the vertical reserved for the set of disadvantaged caste. This in no way makes caste a bad metric for vertical reservation.

All 'test result merits' are just result of 'merit filters' and any 'merit filter' is overtime hogged by people with advantages in specific sets of attributes. If one looks at sibling data of mastering such 'merit filters' it would clearly become visible it is less of a 'merit' thing and more of a 'filter' thing. Thus, all verticals, even the 'General' vertical is being hogged by people with advantages in specific sets of attributes as they have advantage in mastering the 'filter'.

And if our 'merit filters' are not fair enough to be a true reflection of the diversity of our society, then we need fixes beyond these 'merit filters'. Having vertical reservations is one such fix, and a self correcting one. The moment our nation state/society starts removing the disadvantages linked to these attributes: Gender, Caste, Religion, Urban/Rural etc, the competition and thus marks cut-offs within all verticals would be similar, and the existance or non-existance of such vertical reservations won't matter and for the simplicity of the process they'd be removed.

But the question we should ask when there is extremely low cut-off in a vertical isn't "what the hell, how could she get in", it should be "what the hell, where are the others, what is stopping them"?

Tired again. A one liner for utopia would be:

An ideal setup is one in which the a-priory probability of each zygote accessing any arbitrary opportunity is same.