'It's Totally Voluntary There'

Rahul Bajaj, chairman, Bajaj Auto, feels people ought not to confuse reservation with AA. "When people here talk about AA carried out by companies like ibm in the US, they are unfortunately unaware that AA is not mandatory there. It's totally voluntary. AA doesn't mean job reservation." Applying the American AA model to India, he says, would mean that if one of, say, three people applying for a job is from a backward community, then he should be given preference—and not discriminated against.

Should someone decide to do a social audit of Bajaj Auto, it will score high. "More than 35 per cent of our employees are Dalits, STs and those belonging to backward castes. This is true for several other leading companies in the country too," Bajaj contends. Still, what supporters of reservation want to know is how many of this 35 per cent employees hold positions of power.

Sociologist Dipankar Gupta, of Jawaharlal Nehru University, says the AA programmes are rigorous. For one, students are not expected to have grades far lower than the minimum admission prerequisites. But even this does not entitle them to admission. "American universities have to answer some basic questions before that. They are: is the faculty sure the student can pass the course? Will the student get a job that is commensurate with his degree? Lastly, will the student, after acquiring a degree, help his community?" But then, in India too, IIMs and IITs have negligible dropout and failure rates for students who entered via reservation.

A senior faculty member at IIM, Ahmedabad, says, "AA does not compromise quality. If at all, concession is made on grades, that too very marginal and not substantial like quota grades. When people talk of Harvard's standards not being compromised by AA, they don't know that quality is never held hostage."

Deepak Nayyar, member, Knowledge Commission, says he and his colleagues strongly believe that reservation is another form of AA. "But commission members, with the exclusion of two, also feel that while it is right to talk of reservation for SCs and STs, going beyond that requires a thorough examination of alternatives to reservation." His reason: "Our mandate is to build a knowledge society."

Infosys' N.R. Narayana Murthy agrees that social injustice is rampant in India. "But the solution is not reservation in education or in employment," he argues, claiming he's 100 per cent behind initiatives to spend money and effort to enable disadvantaged people to compete as equal competitors.