Reboot affirmative action

Affirmative action in the form of reservation, to address issues of inclusion and equity in higher education, has been in place in India for a long time. Evidence suggests that these policies have not been an unqualified success. What's more, policies that were to be temporary have not only persisted but expanded. Meanwhile, the social conditions that called for affirmative action have not been stable either. The implementation of reservation policies has faced a variety of challenges, from identifying beneficiary groups to the legal interpretation of constitutional provisions.

One of the premises for the reservation policies is that participation in higher education by marginalised groups is very low. Recent studies have highlighted that the measure of participation in higher education is critical to the analysis of differentials across social groups. If the share of a particular socio-religious category (SRC) in the total population is higher than its share studying at the graduation level, the group suffers from a deficit in participation.

While measuring deficits, it is useful to consider the candidates' eligibility for higher education. Those eligible for undergraduate courses need to have completed their higher secondary education. Instead of focusing on the entire population in the relevant age group, measures of participation should focus on the segment that has completed higher secondary education. This explicitly brings the links between secondary and tertiary education into the analysis.

Among the groups eligible for reservation, only Hindu OBC share in the studying population (33.8 per cent) is higher than their quota (27 per cent for all OBCs). Interestingly, the deficits for the marginalised groups and differences between SRCs decline dramatically when one compares the share in the population currently studying at the graduation level with the share in the population that is eligible to go to college. Apart from socio-religious affiliations, participation in higher education can be affected by factors like the household's economic status, gender, region and parental education. Deficits for underprivileged groups are significantly lower among the eligible population, even after we account for a variety of other factors. Thus, once persons from underprivileged groups finish school, their chances of going to college are quite high. Chances of higher education also increase significantly with parental education and are the highest for those whose parents have studied at the graduation level.

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