Author: Hemali Chhapia
Publication: The Times of India
Date: August 5, 2007
Introduction: That Far Exceeds The 9% Reservation
Proposed By Arjun For 2008
Mumbai: Here's something for both the pro-reservation
and anti-reservation camps to chew on. A large chunk of students who made
it to the seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) this year is from the
Other Backward Classes (OBC) category. Post-admission analysis at these prime
institutions reveals that almost 14% of those from the general category are
OBCs. This, when the Union human resource development ministry has plans to
set aside 9% of seats for the OBCs in central institutions from the academic
session beginning 2008.
Across the IITs, a total of 990 OBC students
qualified from the open category. However, only 876 of them attended the counselling
process and only 590 of them enrolled, for reasons ranging from not getting
their choice of discipline to not being allotted the institute of their preference.
Given that there are 4,295 seats in the open category, the percentage of OBC
students is 13.74.
With the reservation policy still on hold,
OBC students were considered on par with the open category students for admission
purposes this year. The data collected by the IITs has something for both
the anti- and pro-reservation camps to think about. "When there are so
many OBC students who are doing well naturally, why set aside seats for them
and demoralise them?'' asked an OBC student who joined IIT Bombay. On the
other hand, the proreservationists declare that the fact that OBCs have done
well even without any special treatment shows up the standard 'no merit' argument
of anti-reservationists as false.
The last word will, of course, come from the
apex court bench that meets on the issue of OBC reservation in central institutions
on Tuesday. This year, when the IITs held their entrance test, the Joint Entrance
Exam, there was no clarity on whether the central institutions would have
to implement OBC reservations or not. The IITs had then asked students to
declare in the examination hall whether they were OBCs or not. Of the 2.43
lakh students who took the JEE, 45,576 (18.75%) were OBCs.