Thursday, July 4, 2019

Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Reservation is pushing back our country by decades' that was published in Newsband


Reservation is pushing back our country by decades
Sometimes an exception on the court verdicts ought to be made in the larger public interest. One such law is the Centre’s Bill to ensure that reservation for scheduled castes, tribes and other backward classes in appointments to central educational institutions
The Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Bill, 2019, was passed by the Lok Sabha. Its main object is to restore the system of treating an institution or a university as a single unit to apply the reservation roster, and thus help fill 7,000 teaching vacancies. The Bill provides welcome relief for aspirants from the disadvantaged sections of society.
The High Court noted that having the whole institution as a unit would result in some departments having only reservation beneficiaries and others only those from the open category. But the counterpoint is equally valid. Having the department as the unit would mean smaller faculties would not have any reservation. On the other hand, taking the institution as the unit would give more opportunities for these sections.
Reservation system seems like "eye for an eye" system. Okay, some societies suffered die to the weak political structure of that time, but will this "revenge" strategy help to reduce caste borders, or someone's playing "divide n conquer" again? Too much obsession with categories and castes - what is the logic to have less meritorious teachers and instead have incompetent ones? This is ONE OF the reasons when India get no place in top 500 educational institutions in world ranking. Reservation is not achieving desired effect. We are just pushing back our country by decades. It is rightly said, ‘Yatha Raaja, thatha Praja’ similarly ‘Yatha teacher, thatha students and so country’.
This kind of arbitrary invocation of ordinance does not augur well for a vibrant democracy,

No comments:

Post a Comment