Opinion | Reassessing Reservations In Higher Education: Start Where The Problem Begins
The path to a just society lies not in engineering outcomes at the finish line, but in equalising preparation at the starting line. That is where battle for equity must be fought
India’s reservation policy today suffers from a fundamental misdiagnosis. It attempts to correct inequality at the finish line—in the form of college admissions and jobs—while neglecting the starting line, where the roots of disparity lie. This approach has created a policy illusion: that genuine representation in elite institutions can be achieved simply through quotas, without confronting the real barriers that begin in early childhood and primary education.
Higher education is not the beginning of opportunity—it is its culmination. Admission into an IIT, IIM, AIIMS, or a top-tier company is not a random lottery; it is the outcome of a decade or more of cumulative advantage—access to good schooling, role models, a stable learning environment, and language fluency. Trying to level the field at this stage through reservation alone is like entering a relay race at the final lap, hoping to make up for lost ground without ever having trained.
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As someone who has studied at IIT Bombay, I have seen this reality up close. At the point of entry, reservations may offer a foot in the door. But once inside, all students are held to the same academic expectations. The classroom does not distinguish between general and reserved category students; the curriculum does not bend to accommodate the gap in preparation. Everyone is evaluated on the same exams, assignments, and projects. In this environment, only those with strong foundational preparation thrive. I witnessed many reserved category students struggle—not because they lacked intelligence, but because they had been thrust into a system without adequate prior scaffolding. The result was often demoralization, not empowerment.
This experience reinforces what the data also tells us: unless we invest in the starting line, in the quality of early education and the cultural capital children receive, we are setting students up to fail at the finish line. The true inequality lies not in who makes it to IIT, but in who is even prepared to imagine it as a possibility.
The real work of inclusion must therefore begin where life itself begins—early childhood. By the age of five, a child’s cognitive, emotional, and linguistic development has largely shaped their learning trajectory. Yet millions of Indian children, especially from marginalized communities, enter school already behind. Poor nutrition, lack of cognitive stimulation at home, and low exposure to an inspiring learning environment mean they start school on unequal footing—and most never catch up.
From there, the primary education system must build a bridge to opportunity. Sadly, in large parts of India, this bridge is broken. Teachers in many government schools are poorly trained, absenteeism is high, and instruction lacks relevance to the lived experiences of the students. Instead of inspiring curiosity and ambition, schools often become places of rote memorization and alienation. No amount of reservation at the university level can undo the effects of years of poor schooling.
Language is another invisible barrier. Children learn best when taught in their mother tongue during early years. Yet many marginalized students are forced to learn in a language they do not speak at home, creating another layer of distance between them and the curriculum. This linguistic alienation compounds the already vast academic gaps and further reduces the likelihood of competitive performance in competitive national exams closer to the finish line.
What’s missing for many of these children is not only academic support but also mentorship and exposure. They lack role models from their own communities who can inspire them, guide them, and help them navigate the world of ambition and aspiration. This absence of “cultural capital" is what reservations attempt to shortcut—but only at the end of the journey.
To truly empower these communities, we must stop focusing on ensuring proportional representation at the top, and instead ask why the pipeline itself is so narrow. Why are there not more well-prepared SC/ST/OBC students even eligible for merit-based selection in premier institutions? Why do dropout rates remain high at the school level despite decades of affirmative action? These are the questions that matter if we are serious about social mobility.
Reservations have their place, but they cannot substitute for competence. They cannot create what the education system failed to deliver. True dignity comes not from charity, but from capability. If we want to uplift the marginalized, we must stop offering them shortcuts to the summit and instead help them climb every step—with confidence, preparation, and pride.
Unfortunately, the current discourse on reservations is no longer about helping the truly disadvantaged. It has become a mechanism for managing group-based resentment and enforcing identity-based parity in outcomes. This, I believe, is a grave misstep. Social justice should not mean reallocating high job positions along caste lines; it should mean ensuring that every child, regardless of background, has an equal shot at preparing for those positions.
India must move from symbolic compensation to structural empowerment. That means investing in the foundations of learning, not forcibly distributing the rewards at the top. Let us support the underprivileged not by handing them a place at the table where they would be at a disadvantage, but by ensuring they are nurtured, taught, and guided from the moment they step into a classroom. In other words, the path to a just society lies not in engineering outcomes at the finish line, but in equalising preparation at the starting line. That is where the real battle for equity must be fought—and won.
The writer is Co-Founder and Vice Chancellor, Rishihood University. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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