IMPACT OF RESERVATION AND CASTE BASED DIVISION OF SOCIETY ON DEVELOPMENT

 IMPACT OF RESERVATION AND CASTE BASED     DIVISION OF SOCIETY ON DEVELOPMENT

The political process of any society is influenced by the nature of the society. To understand the nature of the society we study its social structure. India’s social structure is best understood in terms of caste system wherein the cast is hierarchically arranged. Individuals born in and belonging to the lower castes and the out-castes suffered from many disadvantages and were oppressed and exploited by the upper castes.

In the typical Varna-Vyvastha there are four Varnas: Brahmin (the priest and the intellectual class), Kshatriya (warrior and the ruling class), Vaisyas (the producing class - peasants and artisaas) and Shudra (those who performed menial and ‘polluting’ jobs.One must note here that the ‘varna-vyvastha’ provides more the theory than the actualityof the caste.  Caste is a localized group having a traditional association with an occupation. The principle of birth forms the exclusive basis of membership in a caste group. Accordingly,the choice of occupation is not open but is determined on the basis of one’s birth in a caste.By the time India gained Independence, the Backward classes, because of politicization,had become a force to reckon with.Backward classes refer to three categories of the people-the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and the other backward classes(OBC).

             Since independence two factors have especially brought the issue of caste in Indian politics into sharp focus. These are (1) the introduction of universal adult franchise and (2) the constitutional provisions for protective discrimination in favour of the backward classes.In the process castes’ involvement in politics deepened with every election in India.In addition to the enlarged arena of electoral politics, the constitutional provisions for protective discrimination also provided the ground for castes to play a significant role in politics.One may note here that protective discrimination was meant for three categories of people– the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the OBC — collectively called as the backward classes.Opponents claim that reservation policy creates perverse incentives that strengthen traditional caste boundaries and encourage backwardness.Barker conclude that different effects of reservations encourage both exogamy and endogamy along different dimensions, but the net impact of reservation policy favors exogamy. Reservations for the most depressed groups have existed in some form since the days of British rule.           

           After India achieved independence, the composition of these two groups was finalized into lists of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and their protection was enshrined in the Constitution. The Constitution specifically prohibits discrimination on the basis of caste, and reserves 22.5% of seats in institutions of higher education and government employment. Mandal commission of 1979, which was organized to address the problem of other socially and educationally backwards classes. The Mandal commission recommended the creation of a third category of groups eligible for reservations, Other Backwards Classes (OBC).1 The commission recommended an additional 1,257 groups that should be eligible for reservations, and estimated the population of these groups at 52% of the total population of India. Thecommission also recommended that the total number of seats subject to reservation be increased from 22.5% to 49.5%.The reservation system proposed by the Mandal commission was not intendedto decrease the influence caste, but rather to restore the natural order of the caste system by counteracting the structural inequalities imposed by British rule

These are

            (1) reservation of jobs in government services and in public sector, (2) reservation in educational institutions, and (3) reservations in legislative representations.Under Articles 16(A), 320(4) and 333, 15% and 7% of the jobs are reserved at all levels in the public services for the SCs and STs respectively.Articles 330 and 332 provide for reservation of seats in the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies. 78 seats for the SCs and 38 seats for the STs are reserved in the Lok Sabha.In State Legislative Assemblies 540 and 282 seats ar reserved for SCs and STs respectively.Moreover seats are also reserved in the Panchayati Raj institutions.

reservation to the OBCs in the central services. It identified 3943 castes as OBC and recommended The Union government, however, took a very long time in deciding to provide 27% reservation in government and semigovernment jobs and admission to educational institutions.

           On 13th August 1990 the Union Government headed by V.P. Singh issued an office memorandum extending reservation to the OBCs on the lines recommended by the Mandal Commission. The Supreme Court examined the issue in November 1992 and permitted the Union Government to reserve 27% of the jobs for the OBCs subject to the exclusion of the ‘creamy layer’ among the OBCs. Ramanand Prasad committee was set up by the Union government to identify the“creamy layer”. Once it had done its job, the government executed the order of 13^th August 1990 in September 1993. We must also note that benefits of reservation to the OBC apply only to government jobs

but no seats have been reserved for the OBC in Lok Sabha, and State Legislative

Assemblies — a benefit which has been given to the SCs and STs.                        

           Women constitute nearly half of the entire Indian population. But condition of women in India is miserable, due to illiteracy, poverty and backward social values. Keeping in view the prevalent circumstances, reservation for the women was started to emancipate the women from the drudgery of household.Under the Panchayati Raj system women’s seats have been reserved at both the Panchayat level, and the block & district levels. Some political parties are also debating the issue of giving at least 30% tickets to women candidates for contesting elections of state legislative assembly and also for the parliamentary elections but women’s reservation bill is still pending in the parliament.

         The Panchayat is a system of village-level (Gram Panchayat), block-level (Panchayat Samiti),and district-level (Zilla Parishad) councils, members of which are elected by the people, and are responsible for the administration of local public goods. Each Gram Panchayat (GP) encompasses10,000 people in several villages. Voters elect a council, which then elects among its members a Pradhan (chief) and an Upa-Pradhan (vice-chief). The major responsibilities of the GP are to administer local infrastructure (public buildings, water, roads) and identify targeted welfare recipients. The Panchayat is required to organize two meetings per year, called “Gram Samsad”. These are meetings of villagers and village heads in which all voters may participate.

Since reservation does not affect the percentage of eligible voters attending the Gram Samsad, this corresponds to a net increase in the participation of women, and a decline in the participation of men. Women in villages with reserved Pradhans are twice as likely to have addressed a request or a complaint to the GP Pradhan in the previous six months, and this difference is significant. In Rajasthan, the fact that the Pradhan is a woman has no effect on women’s participation at the Gram Samsad or the occurrence of women’s complaints.Note that women participate more in the Gram Samsad in Rajasthan, most probably because the process is very recent, and the GP leaders are trained to mobilize women in public meetings.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

                       Women are in charge of collecting drinking water, and they are the primary recipients of welfare programs (maternity pension, widow’s pension, and old age pension for the destitute, who tend to be women). In West Bengal, they are the main source of labor employed on the roads. In Rajasthan, both men and women work on roads, and the employment motive is therefore common to both. However, men travel very frequently out of the villages in search of work, while women do not travel long distances; accordingly, men have a stronger need for good roads.In both West Bengal and Rajasthan, the gender of the Pradhan affects the provision of public goods. In both places, there are significantly more investments in drinking water in GPs reserved for women. This may explain the skepticism about the impact of the policy in the face of the evidence.          

                  The first question we can ask is whether SC Pradhans, like women Pradhans, choose to invest in different types of public goods than non-SC Pradhans. We can see that, unlike women, SC Pradhans do not radically change the types of investment they undertake.The reservation to a SC Pradhan may ensure that this happens. When we collected the data in the PRA, we made sure to indicate the location of each public good: Is it in the SC hamlet, the ST hamlet (if any), the general hamlet, or in common areas? For each good, we construct the share of public goods that are located in the SC area, normalized by the share of the population that lives in the area.It seems that in SC hamlets there tends to be more public provision of goods for which there are private substitutes (drinking water wells, sanitation equipment) and less public provision for goods for which there are fewer private substitutes (schools, adult education). Second, there are much less privately provided equivalents of public goods in SC hamlets (we have information for water and irrigation equipment). Third, the indices are very similar in reserved and unreserved GPs, which is reassuring. Before 1998, SC hamlets were not treated differently in GPs that were reserved for SCs from 1998 to 2003.

            Ultimately, the distinction between equalization and elimination is normative,

and should be made by the people of India. There is not enough evidence to make

a positive judgement on a theoretical caste system where opportunities have been

equalized between castes. Caste networks could simply evolve to resemble large,

closely-knit extended families. Individuals from rural, backwards classes will lose access

to their traditional savings and insurance networks.In the case of reservations, a child is eligible if his father is eligible,regardless of his mother’s caste. Individuals in urban areas have greater access to modern credit and insurance institutions that typically replace traditional networks. Urban residents also have greater opportunity outside of their caste network through the modern labor market. Within each state, networks were bounded according to categorical caste and religion identifiers. Respondents were asked to identify both their religion and their caste category. The categories for religion are Hindu, Muslim, Christian,Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Tribal, Other, and None. Categories for caste are Brahmin,Other (high castes), OBC, SC, and ST. Network members were identified by jati name only within these categories, limiting the potential for misidentifications. The first specification estimates the effect of reservation eligibility without controlling for any other factors. This result, while analytically weak, reveals a possible cause for the belief that reservations increase caste identification. The second specification examines the impact of network control variables by presenting regression results using only household controls and results with household and network controls. The specifications with network controls suggests that a change in relative income is much more significant in a household’s marriage decision than a change in absolute income.

                The coefficient on reservation eligibility shows a significant increase, indicating that relative to other high castes, OBCs are 1.213 times as likely to marry

out of caste as high castes, all other things equal. This is an increase from the previous

coefficient estimate of 1.113 when comparing all eligible groups against high and

Brahmin castes. This result suggests that the bias due to unobserved network characteristics is negative, supporting the hypothesis that reservations enable exogamy. Reservation policy is an extremely contentious issue in India. The argument that

reservations perpetuate caste affiliation is one of many made against reservations.

Proponents of reservations either do not recognize caste affiliation as inherently negative or argue that the benefits of reservations outweigh the drawbacks.                             

                It is currently believed that the current system is based on “merit”, that is, ranking of performance in all-India entrance examinations or such similar criteria. Yet

any teacher or administrator at some of these top institutions (such as IITs or IIMs)

will agree that there are typically several hundred candidates of equally good quality at the top, and they are able to admit only a small fraction of them, so that there is a large element of luck and randomness in the process of selection. For example, at the national entrance examination to the IITs every year, there are more than 3,00,000 entrants, yet only around 3,000 gain admittance to the various IITs. This is a system

of reservation of seats in higher education based on wealth, parental income or access to credit in the expectation of future incomes– all of which exclude the majority of the population. It is interesting that the sudden and apparent concern about merit has not touched on the implications of such admissions based on fees and whether students who get in through this means are “deserving” or not, although such processes have been going on for years. So it is clear that reservations can in no sense be seen as any kind of substitute for the more serious and still necessary strategies of change with respect to land reform and other asset redistribution. It is argued that the main divide in India is economic, and that economically speaking, many of the socalled “backward castes” are not at all deprived, either in terms of property ownership or control over resources stemming from political power. The system of reservations would allow these relatively better off groups within the OBCs as generally defined to corner all the benefits, excluding those who are more genuinely in need of special concessions. Meanwhile, the poor and needy among upper caste students would not only receive no benefit in terms of scholarships, etc, but would also be deprived of access despite being more “deserving”. One of the problems of the current system of reservation in the public sector is that there has been no institutional mechanism of incentives and disincentives to ensure effective affirmative action. At the moment, there are “legal” requirements for filling certain quotas, but there are no penalties for public institutions that do not fill them, or rewards for those that more than fulfil them.

                 Estimated to be over 2500 years old, the caste system has undergone many transformations, from the ancient varna system to the contemporary jati system.The three higher varnas are often referred to as “caste Hindus” (upper caste Hindus) or as “twice born”, since (the men of) these castes enter an initiation ceremony (the second birth) and are allowed to wear the sacred thread. Together, the upper castes constitute 17-18 percent of the population.Firstly, the number of jatis today is estimated to be between 2 to 3000. Secondly, most jatis are regional categories, making inter-regional comparisons of jatis less than straightforward. Thirdly, the jati-occupation link is not as straightforward as the varna-occupation link. However, the association between jati and varna at the topmost level (Brahmin jatis, most Kshatriya jatis) and at the bottom (Ati-Sudra or former untouchables) is clearer than it is in the middle ranks. Being at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, the former untouchables not only are poorer, they continue to be targets of discrimination, oppression, violence and exclusion. The names of these jatis are listed in a government schedule and thus in official literature these castes are referred to as Scheduled Castes, or simply as SCs. Mahatma Gandhi referred to them as Harijans,but now Marathi term Dalit, meaning the oppressed, which is seen as a term of pride. It should be noted that in independent India, untouchability is abolished by law, and caste-based discrimination is a crime, in principle. Also, in keeping with the ideal of a casteless society, an individual is not obliged to disclose his/her caste (jati) anywhere. While the caste system is  conventionally associated with Hinduism, all religions in India, including Christianity and Islam, display inter-group disparity akin to a caste system leading to the hypothesis that perhaps caste was a system of social stratification in pre-modern India. Low castes from other religions, such as Dalit Christians, have been demanding affirmative action, but so far it has been restricted to Hindu SCs. Upto the early 1990s, government data was available for three categories: SC, ST, ‘Others’ (everyone who is neither SC nor ST: the residual category). From the mid-1990s, ‘Others’ got divided into OBCs and. The logic for continuing affirmative action for SC and STs is based on the following set of arguments:

1. Inter group economic disparity: there are various standard of living indicators that establish persistent inter group disparity between SC/STs on the one hand and the rest

of the population on the other.Dalits continue to suffer from a “stigmatized ethnic identity” due to their untouchable past and there is corresponding social backwardness. Human Rights Watch (1999) amply demonstrates the various aspects of violence, exclusion and rejection that Dalits continue to face in contemporary India. There is evidence to suggest that this stigma can afffect economic performance adversely, thus perpetuating caste based inequalities.If equality of opportunity between castes is the objective, then affirmative action is needed to provide a level playing field to members of SC/ST communities.Caste based discrimination in labor, land, capital and consumer goods markets (preventing SCs from entering, say, milk production and distribution) continue both in urban and rural areas. The quota based affirmative action programme in India, called the ‘reservation system’, has two components: it is targeted separately towards SC/ST and OBC groups. It is best to examine them separately. 22.5 percent of all government jobs, seats in educational institutions that have complete or partial government funding and electoral constituencies at all levels of government are reserved for SC and ST persons. This quota is roughly proportional to their share in the population.

                    In the evaluation of how many members of the target group have benefited from the quotas the following must be kept in mind. The quota-based scheme in India is similar to a guaranteed minimum scheme, in that quotas are supposed to be filled first and the rest of the seats are allocated on “merit”. Thus, the total number of SC-ST individuals in a job or educational institution will overestimate the actual amount of preference, if some members of the target groups get in without availing themselves of affirmative action. Coming to the two other spheres of affirmative action, government jobs and education, the picture is more complex.The picture in the non-teaching posts conforms to the overall pattern in other government jobs: the higher the representation of SC/ST, the lower paying the job.The menial jobs (cleaners, sweepers and so on) often are performed almost exclusively by Dalits, in particular those jatis whose traditional occupation was cleaning/scavenging.

        The vast majority of Dalits are not directly affected by affirmative action, but reserved jobs bring a many fold increase in the number of families liberated from subservient roles. Several important political leaders, chief ministers of states, ministers in the Central government cabinet (and indeed, the previous President of India, Mr. K. R. Narayanan) are Dalit. However, the implementation of the program in government jobs and educational institutions is mechanical and insincere. Most institutions get away by simply stipulating the mandatory quota; given the lack of a monitoring agency, there is neither the accountability to fill the quota nor penalties for loopholes used to circumvent quota restrictions.

PARMESHWAR LAL BAGARI
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