Affirmative Action for the Middle Class: India’s New Reservation Law

On January 9 and 10 the two houses of the Indian Parliament voted through a new law – the 124th amendment to the country’ constitution. The amendment extends the scope of the country’s affirmative action policies. The timing and the haste with which it was done suggest that the governing coalition has its eyes on the upcoming elections, scheduled for April-May. Beyond the politics, however, is the matter of social justice.

In India, affirmative action takes the form of “reservation,” reserving slots for members of socially discriminated communities at public institutions. Any public company has to keep a percentage of its job positions for members of these communities, and the same goes for student slots at public universities and seats in the Parliament and state assemblies (the last category applies only to some of the discriminated communities). Whether this was a fair solution and how successful it has been remain the subjects of heated debates, but the reservation system is unlikely to go away any time soon.

Furthermore, many communities have wanted to see the reservation system extended. This, however, remains problematic. On the national level, reserved slots at public institutions already reach the level of 49.5 percent and the constitution stipulates reservations cannot cross the 50 percent limit. Thus, the new law, which wants to reserve an additional 10 percent of slots, is already being challenged in court and its future remains uncertain.

Regardless of what happens, is the new law fair? It aims to reserve positions in public companies and educational institutions (not in legislative assemblies) for “Economically Weaker Sections,” a category which the new law itself creates. The trouble is this: These “sections” are defined in such a broad way that many of their members are far from being “economically weak.” Some of the conditions include possessing agricultural land of less than five acres, a residential house with an area of less than 1,000 square feet, and a household income under 800,000 Indian rupees per annum (a little more than $11,000).

Apart from the obvious fact that the poorest often do not possess any land or house, let’s put the income cap in perspective. A family is described as poor in India if it has an annual household income of less than 27,000 Indian rupees. The 800,000 cap introduced in the new law is nearly 30 times above that level. Hence, the income limit in the new law is destined to cover even those that earn 29 times more than people considered to be below the poverty line (this will not do away with the “Below the Poverty Line” category, used here for comparison’s sake). These limits, therefore, would actually cover much of the Indian middle class.

This was perhaps the plan. The better-off are often unhappy with the reservation system as it has left them with a smaller chunk (the unreserved half) of slots at public institutions to compete for. But since the reservation system cannot be undone – no political party will risk such an unpopular move – the government perhaps thought about extending the system to include those that have so far criticized it. Whether they would be happy about this is another question: 10 percent is not so much. People representing the vague category of “Economically Weaker Sections” would under the new law compete for the 10 percent of positions reserved for them, but as they represent much more than 10 percent of society, they would still have to compete for the remaining 40 percent. Seen this way, this law is all but socially just.

There is another point to make. There are a lot of poor people that are not covered by the reservation system. The original system set up in the 1950s defined the discriminated communities as select ethnic groups – most of the Dalit (untouchable) castes and backward tribes – who were kept at the lowest rungs on the social ladder. Their conditions were and remain dire but what if there are also communities that are not as low in terms of the orthodox Indian social hierarchy but are or have become economically poor? Moreover, a “caste” itself is a category mostly used in Hindu communities. Most destitute Muslims, for instance, did not benefit from the original reservation system. When the reservations were extended in 1990, the system used socioeconomic categories rather than ethnic and religious denominations. Even more importantly, what both iterations of the reservation system did was consider whole communities, not individuals, as units eligible for affirmative action. Poor individuals from communities considered well-off were not considered.

Thus, while the limits of the new reservation law are ridiculous, its only good aspect is that it considers households, not communities. The rationale of the original reservation system was that discriminated communities, having been kept at the margins of society and on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, needed assistance from the state. Reserving positions for them would provide members of these groups with resources and education, and the idea was that these opportunities would be shared by the individuals with their groups, spreading the social uplift. But this trickle-down effect has not quite manifested as envisioned. Individuals did benefit, but not necessarily whole communities.

Perhaps a much better solution would be to focus reservations on individuals or households. Family income is a much more clear distinction than the social standing of a broad community. While this would be both socially more just and politically unviable, the reservation system should not be extended all the way up to the middle classes but perhaps revised with the use of such categories as household income.