Suggestions, both private and official, have inundated the Moily Oversight Committee on OBC reservations in institutions of higher education. The commerce ministry’s call for a liberal education order is the latest in a long line of varied advice. But all the suggestions have one thing in common and they share this with the reservation policy itself: the flawed assumption that deprivation has only two facets in India — being born in a caste or tribe listed in government records as backward or depressed, and/or being born in a poor family.

In reality, the single most influential factor that determines access to elite educational institutions, and hence to important avenues of economic and social advancement, is command over the English language. The advantage that English-based education provides often trumps the traditional divides of caste and class.

However, despite the dominance of English in our education system for over a century, proficiency in English is unattainable for most and creates conditions of unequal competition for the vast majority. More than a century and a half after English came to be imposed as a language of governance and for the elite professions, no more than 1 per cent of our people use it as a first or second language. The rest find all avenues of advancement firmly shut before them. A person who has failed to acquire this magical skill may be a first-rate scholar in Marathi, Hindi or Assamese but that will not make that person eligible for anything more than a peon’s job even within the linguistic boundaries of Maharashtra, UP or Assam — states in which these languages are spoken by millions of people.

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