Empirical impact of reservations is yet an un-studied phenomenon
The first evaluation of the impact of reservations on
educational attainment has shown that quotas in educational institutions
did indeed improve the education indicators of the Scheduled Castes
(SCs), but nearly all of the improvement was among boys only. The SC
girls experienced next to no improvement in their education levels as a
result of reservations.
While there is broad
political consensus on the value of affirmative action in educational
institutions for children from scheduled castes, the empirical impact of
reservations is yet an un-studied phenomenon. What makes it
particularly difficult is that no data is available on the educational
levels of people before and after reservations came into effect.
Guilhem
Cassan, an economist and assistant professor at the University of Namur
in Belgium, took advantage of a natural experiment which occurred in
1976, when the lists of SCs were harmonised across States for the first
time since Independence, giving fresh SC status to 25 lakh more people.
Mr. Cassan was thus able to compare the educational levels of those
people who had had the SC status since Independence, and those who were
of school-going age when they got the SC status in 1976.
For
educational levels, Mr. Cassan turned to the 1998-99 National Family
Health Survey-2, the only large-scale official Indian survey that
includes both precise caste group names and data on educational
outcomes.
Mr. Cassan found that access to the SC
status led to an increase of 0.3 years of schooling which may sound
small, but is large in statistical terms. “It has to be put in
perspective with the average level of education in this population,
which is of 4.2 years (for individuals born between 1950 and 1979).
Hence, 0.3 years of education is a 7% increase in the number of years of
education of this population,” Mr. Cassan told The Hindu.
To
broaden the understanding of educational attainment from years of
schooling alone to measures of skills, Mr. Cassan also looked at
literacy levels and numeracy levels. While literacy is measured in a
straightforward way, Mr. Cassan constructed an unusual measure of
numeracy, by looking at a respondent’s tendency to round off his or her
reported age, something that is associated with a discomfort with
numbers.
Access to the SC status led to an
improvement in both literacy and numeracy levels, Mr. Cassan found.
However, the findings were extremely uneven across gender, to the extent
that most of the improvements in SC educational attainment was among
boys alone; reservations had next to no impact on educational outcomes
for girls, Mr. Cassan found. For males alone, access to the SC status
meant an increase of 0.7 years of schooling on average; a 12% increase
for boys, and 0% for girls.
“Gender is clearly a
dimension that is too often neglected in the reservation debate,” Mr.
Cassan said. “However, this issue goes beyond the caste question, as
girls in general are discriminated against,” he added.
The
Scheduled Caste girls face the combined effect of patriarchy and
poverty, Sukhadeo Thorat, chairman of the Indian Council for Social
Science Research and an economist who has widely published on the impact
of caste, told The Hindu. However the newer generation of
scheduled castes have begun to increasingly send girls to school and
even on to higher education, Dr. Thorat said. A sharp rural-urban gap in
female enrolment in higher education remains, he added.
