Why we need reservation

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field. Edmund Burke 1729 -97.

My take on the reservation issue exactly.


Most of the real India doesn’t have a level playing field.
Have you chaps who are making such a fuss about skipping a couple of meals all in the hope of making a point in the overfed media, ever have tried to live on what the poor in India make?
Between Rs 60 and Rs 90 a day! And only if and when they can get work. Most people on the poverty line [those fortunate to earn a dollar a day] hardly scrape together a thousand rupees a month because work is seasonal and scarce.
And they have to feeds their whole family on that.

The reservation issue is the biggest non-issue ever. Why increase seats when most of the real Dalits can’t ever make it near those high-tech Medical institutions, ... except to clean toilets, maybe.

And let me tell you exactly why we need more doctors from the ‘lower castes’ even though they may not be as ‘brilliant’ as the well fed and pampered upper classes: we need them to look after their own community, to work in places where your so-called upper class doctor yuppie kids will never be. To man those several thousand health centres in rural India that have absentee doctors. To give the very poor and disadvantaged access to health care. A Dalit doctor will be a damn sight better at forensic medicine than the Brahmin fellow who sits outside while an underling does the autopsy, because good Brahmins never touch dead bodies. I have researched this one and I have seen this with my own eyes, so don’t get cute with me and contest it.

The government of India has been subsidising medical studies for decades, and it only benefits the rich, the urban, and those with means. It’s time that some of that subsidised education is accessible to doctors who will not flinch from bringing succour to the untouchables, the Dalits, the humble communities in the remote villages.

An ordinary non-brilliant physician is a damn sight better than no physician at all.