Reservation, Quota and me

This one it to find the answer of the question 'Do reservations of any form serve any purpose? Or are they good for nothing?'

Assumption: To excel one needs a minimum level of self-motivation and determination.

A greedy approach tells me that for the nation to move ahead at good pace we can't give the reins to anyone less than the best. But, i am yet to prove that greedy works in this case.

Let's see what will help the nation in a longer-run. I think that we need to increase this number of 'self motivated' lot (we have very few of them when compared to the total population of India). Most of the population is locked-in the rural/slums/poverty.

Most of us get motivated through our parents/relatives/neighbors or the environment around us. In short, we all have a social network which affects/motivates us. But, there are lot many groups in our country which are completely isolated and their members have no direct link to any well-educated/informed person to get motivated from (I will call this lot the unprivileged lot and others the privileged ones). It is here that I feel that we need to plant some people to generate the motivation. This can be achieved through various measures. It can be outsiders (like teachers/ngo's/social workers) or insiders (someone from the same group who has been uplifted/trained by govt help). These people can serve as mentors to many budding and promising talents and will thereby increase the size of the talent-basket (the basket which caters to iit's/aiims/isro/civil services/politics/judiciary etc).

In my opinion reservation can help in developing some of these mentors. The people from the privileged lot aren't expected to have that kind of feedback effect, as most of the members of this group are well connected and receive feedback from various sources. Being at a certain level an uplifted people from unprivileged lot are certain to have some foresight (far better than what a average person in group has) which can be of immense help to people in their social contact. They may include their own children, relatives, neighbors and many others. Say, for example a shepherd's son gets selected in the local engineering college and becomes a engineer using the reserved seat. He may not prove to be the best student of the college but there is a high probability of him proving to be a good feedback mechanism to the social group he belongs to. There will be a spurt of students aspiring to be him or may be better him.

Seems, this can create a revolution in the village, but there's a catch. If the person doesn't really belong to such an isolated group or if he doesn't have any ties with such isolated social groups, the effects would be minimal. Therefore, we need to identify the groups carefully. Prima-facie it seems that the correlation of the isolation levels with the poverty is very high and it's safe to assume that poor social groups are more likely to be more isolated.

I will continue on this and try to find out various ways to identify groups, their economic levels.