In January, India dropped the qualifying cut-off for postgraduate medical seats to zero percentile for reserved categories. That made candidates with minus 40 marks eligible. For general and EWS candidates it fell to the 7th percentile, about 103 marks out of 800. A candidate with minus 12 marks was given an MD. Others with negative scores entered orthopaedics, obstetrics and general surgery.
The reason was not ideology. Eighteen thousand seats were sitting empty, most of them in private colleges and in specialities students avoid because of the fees and the weak faculty. AIIMS seats never go empty.
So the state had a problem of cost and capacity. It solved it by lowering the standard for becoming a surgeon.
That is the pattern I want to write about. India fixes the gate because fixing the building is harder.
What actually lifted my family
In school we were taught we were all equal. For a while that was true. I did not know the caste of the boys I sat beside.
I do remember a woman who came to my grandmother’s house. She took off her chappals at the door before entering, because that was the custom. One winter my sister and I told her to keep them on. The floor was marble and it was freezing. My grandmother did not object. The custom ended in that house that day.
Two things are true about that memory. A rule that felt permanent collapsed because two children thought it was silly. And it was happening in my own family, in my own lifetime.
My father grew up poor. He owned one kurta pyjama through his studying years and ate potatoes three times a day. He went to a government school and he topped it. He cleared his exams, became an engineer and took a government job. Several of his classmates did the same. None of them received any reservation benefit.
That one job changed everything after it. We lived like lower middle class, but the job paid for my education, and that is the only reason I am writing this instead of doing something else.
So I will say something people on my side of this argument usually will not. The mechanism of reservation works. One government job lifts a family permanently. That is what is being fought over, and anyone who dismisses it has not understood the stakes.
The boys just behind my father were equally poor and nearly as capable. They had no category. The door shut. Their families stayed where they were for another generation.
For years I thought reservation was why that door was so narrow. Then I looked at the numbers.
The shortage nobody is protesting about
In Karnataka, about 4.5 lakh people have cleared the teacher eligibility test since 2014-15. Only 28,277 have been hired. That is sixteen qualified candidates for every post filled. Remove every quota tomorrow and almost all of them are still shut out.
The same department carries 79,694 vacancies, the most of any department in the state. The posts exist. They are not being filled. Recruitment is frozen while a case about internal reservation within the Scheduled Castes sits unresolved in court. Fifty thousand temporary teachers are covering the gap, which guarantees churn in exactly the schools that serve the poorest children.
Nationally there are roughly 10 lakh teaching vacancies. Half of Class 5 students read at a Class 2 level.
We are fighting over how to divide a shortage while the shortage grows.
Merit, honestly
Merit is not a dirty word. A country cannot run hospitals or build bridges on sentiment.
But I went looking for evidence that reservation damages institutions, and the best available study does not support it. Researchers examined twenty-two years of data from the Indian Railways, the largest employer in the world subject to affirmative action. They found no sign that a higher proportion of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe employees reduced productivity. Some results pointed mildly the other way.
Open competition is not clean either. Research on India’s private sector found that caste and religion shape an employer’s judgement of a candidate’s ability before any work has been seen.
So where does the inefficiency come from? Not from who walks through the door. From what happens after.
A government post is close to unloseable. Promotion runs on seniority. Performance is rarely measured and almost never penalised. Teachers are pulled off teaching for census and election duty. A controlled trial in Andhra Pradesh found that linking pay to performance produced real learning gains where the same money spent on inputs did not.
India argues endlessly about entry and almost never about accountability.
What I would change
Once is enough. If reservation has already lifted a family, it worked, and it should stop there. When the child of two IAS officers receives the same support as a first-generation learner whose parents cannot read the application form, the policy is looking at a surname and not at a life. The poorest inside reserved communities are now competing against the grandchildren of people who already escaped.
Set a floor and defend it. No one should enter a profession where failure kills people below a minimum standard, and it should be the same standard for everyone. Empty seats are a signal about fees and faculty, not an invitation to lower the bar.
Review it on a schedule. Brazil wrote a review date into its quota law and examined the evidence when the date arrived. Malaysia has run preferences without end for decades and still has not closed the gap. India has no sunset, no published outcome data and no mechanism for asking whether any of this works. It has only elections.
I do not want anyone’s seat taken away. I want what happened to my father to be available to every child. A government school good enough to produce a topper, and enough posts that being excellent is sufficient.
