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The result is always fights and fights to prove or disprove. As a result, a lot of psychological energies are spent on proving and disproving. This results in enormous energies wasted in unproductive transactions.

The amount of wastage of nation’s time in inter-state time wasted in water disputes, communal riots and their aftermath, caste wars are all drags on the nation.
It affects economic development. Our policy makers should be sensitive to this and should engage the nation in more productive issues than in such transactional issues. They should aim building integrative minds rather than perpetuating the divisiveness in our country. What we need today is an integrative minds for nation building and not those who are dividing the nation further. People and politicians and policy makers who are capable of working towards projecting an integrated India and Indians as one is the need of the hour.

In India, certain sections were, and perhaps continue to be, backward by virtue of the community in which they were born. This was the story a few decades ago. Not any more. I come from a village in Andhra, which was dominated by upper caste community. Recently, when I visited my village, the President was from SC and I had to go to meet him to get a certificate of succession after my mother’s death. It was very pleasing to see the same village being managed by SC community who otherwise stayed outside the village. This is what reservations has done in the last few decades and there has been an appreciable growth. I also noticed that many from the so-called forward communities are at the same level as the OBCs economically.

Reservations are not in the interests of the OBCs themselves, as it undermines their merit.

When I was PGP Chairman at IIMA in mid-eighties, we were admitting a number of candidates on reservation, as per the Govt. directive. We were lowering the admission standard to fill the reservation quota to a point but not beyond a point. Even then we discovered across the years that while some of the candidates admitted through quota made a mark like others, a few of them would not pass the minimum standards and either have to repeat or even drop out.

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* Contributed by -
Dr. T. V. Rao,
Formerly Professor, IIMA,
Chairman, TVRLS,
Ahmedabad.