Book Review

Title :                     Caste - Based Reservations and Human Development in India

Editor :                   By KS Chalam

Published by :        Sage Publications

Pages :                   210

Price :                    Rs 275

The editor, KS Chalam, Member, Union Public Service Commission, New Delhi, analyses one of the most contentious issues of our times – caste-based reservations, one which has seen tragic, needless, deaths, riots and one which has torn the country apart into protagonists and antagonists.

Caste-based reservations have existed in India for more than a century, it was initially introduced by the British to bring about equal opportunity in education. Later reservation was extended to other sectors of the development process to overcome the economic inequalities attributed to caste.

Today India along with Brazil, Russia and China (BRIC) are amongst the fastest developing countries in the world in terms of GNP. The transition from under developed to a developing country is not without its massive problems and limitations and each country has to tackle its peculiar issues. One of the main issues being that the fruits of development does not percolate to all sections of society. No democratic society can survive keeping a vast majority of its population away from participating in the socio-economic processes. The democratic principle of "one man, one vote" needs to be translated into all spheres of public life. With all this in mind the framers of our Constitution had incorporated caste-based reservations as one of the methods of achieving this. But no effort was made to assess the impact of the strategy. While people were polarized as ‘for’ and ‘against’, the country’s intellectual did not come forward to participate in the debate – it is this lacuna, the lack of a dispassionate judgement, that the author purports to fill in with this volume.

The situation in India , feels the author, is not different from what has happened in the USA. The Dalits here take the role of African-Americans. When India entered the liberal capitalist frame in the 90s, the powers that be, recognized that the feudal system was not passing on the economic benefit down the line to the lowest strata.

Historical data and exhaustive tables apart, the volume analyses what can well be termed the modern history of caste-based reservations and its ongoing impact. What is the alternative? Representation? As more respectable than reservations? The individual in India represents a caste or community and therefore it is necessary to ensure that each caste or community is adequately represented in the institutions through which the system operates.

To ensure that the democratic capitalism functions efficiently, all groups, both advantaged and disadvantaged need to be proportionately represented, in all organizations, be it private or public, education or employment, parliamentary seats or panchayat and so on.

Well concluded, but whither implementation? The acid test in a democratic process is consensus and implementation, each one of us has been a witness to this. While no right thinking person disagrees with representation and even reservation, in over half a century of Independence we have not found the right way of going about it!  q

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