Towards egalitarian socio-economic order

(MainsGS2: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.)

Context:

• Reservation was introduced as a short-term measure to give opportunities to classes of people who were socially and educationally backward and/or inadequately represented in education, employment, politics and other spheres.

Self-perpetuating mechanism:

• Even after seven decades of reservation, we are not able to claim success in eliminating the cause that required reservation in the first place.
• In our personal lives and careers, if a solution to a problem doesn’t give the expected result within a reasonable time frame, we reconsider the solution and try to improve it.
• However, successive governments kept extending the reservation system, hoping for a different outcome and people who benefited from reservation wanted the system to continue for successive generations too. 
• It was clear that the reservation system was being used by them as a self-perpetuating mechanism as a result, those who really needed reservation were deprived of its benefits.

Extending the system:

• Social and educational backwardness go hand-in-hand with economic weakness.
• More than 70 years of reservation has brought economic prosperity to a large section of people and given them adequate representation.
• Ideally, families that have been brought above the poverty line through adequate employment opportunities and other benefits should make way for others who are less fortunate.
• But they oppose extending the system to the economically weaker sections (EWS) of society only because some of the beneficiaries could be from the so-called ‘forward’ communities.

Stepping stone:

• The caste and reservation system is still being kept alive only so that political parties and those who have benefited from the system so far can continue to milk it.
• The government has a constitutional and moral duty to achieve the goal of “social, economic and political justice,” mentioned in the Preamble.
• The 10% quota for the EWS aims to correct an anomaly in the system that is depriving deserving and qualified people.
• We need to accept that reservation on the basis of economic criteria is the need of the hour and the stepping stone to achieving economic and social justice.

Conclusion:

• The judgment that sets the basis for 10% quota said, “If an egalitarian socio-economic order is the goal..., the deprivations arising from economic disadvantages, including those of discrimination and exclusion, need to be addressed to by the State; and for that matter, every affirmative action has the sanction of our Constitution...”