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Equal education for all

The Supreme Court a few days ago decided there should be no reservations in the super speciality courses and struck down an Uttar Pradesh Act that lowered the marks for admission to post-graduate medical courses from 35 per cent to 20 per cent for the so-called lower castes. In a 4:1 majority, the Supreme Court observed: "At the level of admission to the super speciality courses, no special provision is permissible, they being contrary to national interest. Merit alone can be the basis of selection."

The first term, national interest, can mean anything to anyone. Any act has often been justified in the "national interest". Yet, the so-called "national interest" has never been defined. And it means different things to different people at different times. When years ago, Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency in the country due to internal problems, she said it was in the national interest. Today, everyone except for Congress sycophants agree that it was against the national interest. So much for this much-abused term!

Then there is the concept of merit that is an extremely difficult ability to gauge because merit itself is dependent on so many variables and imponderables that any measurement can only be relative, never absolute.

In a classroom of students who hail for similar backgrounds, live more or less in similar neighbourhoods, it is easy to judge students. One student gets the first rank while others flunk their exams. It is nobody's case that the students who get top ranks must be admitted to better colleges, courses, while those who perform badly may take up courses keeping in mind their ability.

But how do you judge students not in the same classroom, not from the same background (socially, culturally, economically), students in classrooms with all the available facilities dreamed of vis-à-vis students in classrooms that lack even the basic amenities?

In northwest Bombay, there is a very good English medium school in northwest Bombay, Jamnabai Narsee. It is also one of the most expensive schools in Bombay. Right next to Jamnabai Narsee, there is (or at least there was in the 1970s) a Gujarati medium school, catering to students from the lower strata of society. The upper middle-class children went to Jamnabai while their servants' children went to the other school!

Jamnabai then, and now, offered state of the art education -- a vast library, small classrooms and personalised attention from extremely well-paid teachers, and so on. Not unnaturally, students from that school were well read, well educated, knowledgeable and able to compete with the best of India and the world.

The school next door (whose name I regret I cannot recall) had many facilities if compared to the schools in villages. But of course, next to Jamnabai Narsee it was, and still is, a very, very poor second cousin. Now, in any competition between the students of Jamnabai and the poor school, is there any doubt about which students will do better? And why?

If this is the case with this comparatively "poor" school which could still provide decent, if not good, education in comparison to what India's hundreds of "municipal schools offer". No parent today in an urban area will send their children to a municipal school if they can afford it. Sadly, India is filled with people who cannot even afford this inexpensive school and are forced to utilise the municipal schools, starved of funds and concern by all.

Worse is the plight of the students in the villages, where the bulk of India's lower castes still reside. Here, the kind of schools exist should shame any self-respecting nation, except Indians. Schools with no blackboards, no books, no libraries, with one teacher for all levels, no attention and care. Schools that are located kilometres away from residences, forcing five-year olds to walk the huge distance, come sun, rain or cold winds. How can such a student even do well in his exams, let alone compete with India's better off in the urban areas? He may be extremely intelligent but the intelligence has never been nurtured or developed.

Such a student's bad marks is not lack of merit, as many like to believe (and which logic the Supreme Court seems to have followed), but the lack of opportunity. And such a student needs special chance to study at the highest level, often by way of lowering the entrance standards.

The famous philosopher, Plato, had devised a method to judge merit in his book The Republic. He suggested that all children should be brought up together in an atmosphere that offered equal opportunities to all. In such a situation, the best could be discovered and who would then go on to become scholar-statesmen. Such an idea is, of course, unworkable but the point to be noted is that Plato realised that to truly judge merit, the background has to be the same.

The above argument is a plea for ensuring quality schooling all over India so that when all our students take the IIT or IAS exams, they are at the same level of knowledge and intellect. Then, and then alone, can merit be considered as the sole criteria for selection. No one can compare the merit of a poor boy in a village struggling to go to school and a boy from, say, Jamnabai Narsee. They occupy different galaxies, not just different worlds.

There has been a demand to scrap reservation on the basis of economic ability and not caste. While there is a case here, let us remember, and which the statistic books will clearly prove, that caste and wealth in India are linked like Siamese twins, with a few exceptions on both sides. India's poorest are invariably from the lowest castes, while most of the upper and middle classes usually from the upper castes.

Then there are certain psychological and social factors, brought about by generations of conditioning. It has been noticed that poor, upper caste parents will ensure that their children study, often up to graduate levels and beyond. However, both society and parents rarely encourage poor, lower caste students to pursue higher studies, and there is a horrendous dearth of lower caste professors and specialists.

Virtually all school dropouts are from the lower castes, caused by poverty and social factors. If studying in schools is so difficult, it only gets worse in colleges and beyond. This only shows that the need for special admission norms is more at the higher levels so that lower castes students are encouraged to pursue further studies. At schools, the need is for sufficient numbers of good classrooms, teachers, schemes to retain students (such as midday meals, free books, etc) and universal education regardless of caste.

Last, there is no doubt that reservations must end, sooner than later. The architect of the Constitution, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, who was also the undisputed leader of the scheduled castes, had sought reservations for only 10 years (that is, up to 1960). But reservations cannot end unless and until most of all students get an education that puts each and everyone on an even keel. And till that state is reached, merit remains a subjective term while the national interest lies in ensuring that more students from a wider background have the opportunity of studying at the highest levels.

Amberish K Diwanji