Reservations have their own merit: inclusion

The Quota vs Quality Argument is Wrong

In a recent Op-ed piece in this paper, titled A working hypothesis: Reservations won’t help, Prof V Raghunathan used data and anecdotes to highlight the pathetic quality in doctoral programmes across universities.

It is fair to grant the argument that the doctoral programmes in several universities of the country need a serious look.

While that is an important argument, he slips in the issue of reservations and conflates it with quality.

He raises a concern saying “compelling higher rated institutions like IIMs and IITs to admit underprepared students from socio-economically weaker backgrounds into their PhD programmes will not correct the ills of a fundamentally flawed system…” So if the system itself is fundamentally flawed, then to insinuate that it gets worse due to students from socio-economically weaker backgrounds is problematic because both the general category students and those from the socially weaker sections come from the same (inferior) cohort under this system. 

Conflating reservations and merit to argue against the former is not a new argument. First, the argument of merit: What is defined as merit is a moot question. Michael Sandel questions the very notion of merit in his seminal book, The Tyranny of Merit. But that is a larger argument. Where the notion of merit is narrowly defined, it throws up a set of “people like us” coming from a very limited section of the society. Ajantha Subramanian’s fantastic book The Caste of Merit uses the case study of IIT Madras to document the limitation of this approach of a narrow definition of merit. Reservations facilitate inclusion and diversity. They pry open the space by widening the concept of merit by providing for the unidentified strengths accrued from lived experience and negotiating hierarchies. This is done while slightly slipping down the bar of the classical and narrow definition of merit. 

For the purposes of admission to higher education, broadly there are three axes on which ‘merit’ is measured -- disciplinary knowledge (represented by the undergraduate marks which have a cut-off higher than the pass marks); the computational ability; and the comprehension and language skills, which are assessed through a series of tests that help students to qualify. What do reservations do? They throw up a larger cohort of applicants with a lesser cut-off point for consideration.

Compelling higher education institutions to look at a larger cohort obligates them to look at the applications carefully and with some element of empathy. In higher education, particularly in the IIMs, where graduates of engineering may obtain a doctorate in human resource management or economics, the issue of pre-existing disciplinary knowledge or methodological skill is not assumed but these are imparted as a part of the course work. Therefore, one is looking basically at a potential graduate who has aptitude to undertake a rigorous research project and live with research as a profession. Whether linguistic competence is crucial as a measurement of merit is another question. There are multiple ways to bridge that gap.

A similar hue and cry was raised when IIMs and IITs were mandated to provide 27% reservations for the Other Backward Classes  (OBC) way back in 2008. In the 15 years since, there has been no indication that the merit of the IIMs or IITs have fallen due to this policy. Co-incidentally, the IIMs and IITs have started moving upwards on the global rankings of business schools and universities. If IIMs are to implement reservations in their doctoral programmes, this is the time. We have around 15 years of experience in graduating students who have gone through the grind of an MBA. Apart from the global pool, these are also the pool of students available for the PhD programmes. Not only have the total number of student admitted at graduate level increased in each IIM/IIT, but also the number of IIMs/IITs have also increased.

What do reservations do? They make it inevitable for us to look at admission applications carefully. They bring in diversity in the student body, which would later translate to diversity in the faculty body. They help in a better connect with the student body who (due to reservations) represent the diversity. Let us look at two other instances of reservations -- that of women in local bodies and women on corporate boards. Both these have led to a new generation of leaders emerging -- those who might not have been otherwise considered because of our inherent biases. 

There are ways in which the so-called “deficiencies” can be bridged to make reservations and inclusivity work. IIM-Bangalore, for instance, runs the N S Ramaswamy Pre-Doctoral Fellow Programme specifically aimed at students who are eligible for reservations to prepare better for a doctoral course.

With the reservation policy, we are obligated to examine every application from the reserved category carefully before saying no. Applications do get rejected on merit. But before that, they are examined carefully to see if there is an inherent merit in the candidate while being ranked relatively lower. The applicants on the margins of the meritocratic cut-off thus get a better chance. After all, these cut-offs are arbitrary and subjective, while appearing to be objective criteria. How is someone a notch below the cut-off significantly lacking than someone a notch above? The experience with reservations till now has not raised red flags on merit or excellence. Opposing reservations with the merit argument actually misses the point.

If there are no compromises on basic qualifiers, no significant deficits in disciplinary knowledge, and a candidate from the classes that claim reservations is offered in favour of someone from the general category, we are making the pool more inclusive and diverse. Prof Raghunathan should continue to write about the pathetic state of research and output in our academic world and argue for reform, without training guns on reservations. There is no evidence to point out that reservations have been the reason for the pathetic state of higher education. The reform of higher education needs to be addressed urgently without conflating it with reservations. Reservations certainly are not the primary reason for the pathetic state of higher education.

(The writer is Professor, Centre for Public Policy, IIM-Bangalore)