Reservation for Women Bill – How it is not double standards

The Bill for reservation of seats in the Parliament for women has been there in the Parliament for an enormous amount of time, but nothing solid has been achieved upon it as it has been thrown around, delayed, thrown some more, and delayed a lot more. It has elicited a lot of public opinion, many NDTV Big Fights would have been held on this, and similar to this, many blog-posts would have been written. It basically says that one-third of the seats in the Parliament should be reserved for women, because of the current woeful representation(59). Some politicians like Sharad Yadav have made it clear that ingesting poison would be better than passing this bill.

The idea for writing on this came from a post my friend made here. Now if you read his opinion, the point which he makes is that the same liberals, who oppose reservation on the basis of caste, have no qualms reserving 33 % of the Parliament for women. Now, from this statement, my first conclusion is that since I agree to this, I am defined a liberal. And as a justification for my argument, I would say that I am not opposed to reservation on the basis of caste as such. During the Arjun Singh fiasco, when he introduced reservations for OBCs in educational institutions, I was not aghast at reservations being introduced in “premier” institutions like IITs and IIMs. I was rather against the fact that reservations are still needed, when they were supposed to be phased out after implementation in two 5-year plans, i.e. if this was 1950, I would not be against reservation on the basis of caste. Even now, reservation on the basis of financial status, albeit a little lesser than 50 % is fine with me, it is almost equivalent to giving scholarships to people who need it so that they can study. But reservation on the basis of caste now, I am against it simply because it has lost its status as a means for supposedly lower-caste people to join the mainstream and has become a shortcut for ‘affluent’ ‘lower-caste’ people to good education and jobs. I mean, the Gujjars were creating a riot 2 years back because they wanted to be declared as a ‘backward’ caste! Is that signs of a successful reservation system? I don’t think so.
Now coming to the reservation for women in the Parliament, I support it because of the same reason that I would have supported caste-based reservation in 1950 or financial status based reservation now – the representation of women in the Parliament is low, and it needs to increase. Now people may say that since this is a democracy, everyone has an equal right to being a representative of the people, and there should be no reservation in the Parliament. I disagree. I say, that would have been true, if ours was a perfect democracy, and women were treated here like they are anywhere else in the world. Since that is definitely not the case, hence rules for a perfect democracy cannot and should not be applied to India. Instead, we should bend the rules a little bit, so that India moves towards that dream democracy that it is not, but is trying to be. My idea is, reservation for women should be introduced, but with a clause. It should be phased out after 5 elections. Hopefully, in the course of these 5 elections, women will start getting adequate representation in the Parliament, things will start working out better for women in the country, and then, we should remove the quota in phases to find that the no. of women doesn’t substantially change, even though the quota is gone. This was the basic idea behind caste-based reservation way back in the 50s, and hence I support both of them.
There are some people who are saying that caste-based quota should be introduced within the women’s reservation in the Parliament. But as there is no caste-based reservation for the men in the Parliament, why is there such a need for women. Also, caste and vote bank politics ensures that welfare of ‘lower caste’ is adequately represented in the House. Ergo, I am against that too.
Bottom line is, I believe that supporting reservation for women in the Parliament while opposing caste-based quota in educational institutions and jobs is not hypocrisy. The Women’s Reservation Bill is long overdue in the Parliament, and I believe it should be passed.

Nothing Else Matters

My piano cover of Nothing Else Matters by Metallica. This version is heavily inspired from the performance of Saras Hostel in our inter hostel WM Group Competition in LitSoc 2009 (especially the interlude). Its on a KORG SP200 and the weird camera angle is because i wanted it closest to the amp. I have a made quite a few mistakes here and there, and need to improve my pedalling.

Should IITs be expanded?

Read this-

IITs to introduce medical and law courses

Kapil Sibal’s recent announcements as the HRD minister have evoked a lot of response, especially from the student community. First of all, I would like to say that compared to Arjun Singh, he seems a lot better and for once I think we will see more of people-centric decisions than caste or vote bank appeasing ones.
Coming to the announcement of IITs to become universities offering medical, law and other courses, I feel that it is unnecessary more than useful/harmful. I mean, it won’t do any harm, but it won’t do any good either. Just associating with the IIT doesn’t mean that the quality of the courses will by default be good. Besides, it’s an Indian Institute of Technology and if the above move takes place, we would have to rename it. (though that is of least concern possible)

The logic behind this move seems that since IIT is a premier institute when it comes to engineering, people will automatically think that a law (purely for the sake of example) course from an IIT is also good and hence we can go on creating top-level courses for each discipline by just offering it in an IIT. This is flawed according to me, and I can give an example for that. IIT Madras offers a 5-year MA course, through the entrance exam HSE. Currently, only a small fraction of the students studying humanities (students mainly studying in South India) write this exam, even though I am sure that this course is pretty good. The reason that it is not popular is because it will take some time for its reputation to build. Its first batch is yet to pass out. The same applies to what the HRD Minister is suggesting – even though it will be offered from a premier institution, any course will take some time to become popular among students as one of the best in the country. If this is the case, then you need not club it with IIT as a university – you can as well start a new college or like IITs, a number of colleges for, say medicine or law (for which you can increase the number of National Law Schools, which are to law as IITs are to engineering). The reason for saying that IIT should offer courses is pretty much bunk, is what I am trying to say. Instead of starting new IITs all over, the government can do a favour to students by starting medical colleges on the lines of IITs, because I remember even when I was in 10th, people intending to go to the medicine field were meticulously told by family and friends, that the number of colleges in the country is low, but on the other hand engineering students are always told –“kahin pe to ho hi jaayega” (which translates to – “you will get into some college or the other”) because of the surplus engineering colleges in the country. That is the reason why engineering has become the foremost option in any parent’s mind when it comes to their child’s career.

When I was discussing this with my friend, he argued that this decision was good because slowly people will start treating humanities and commerce students on par with science students. This is pretty baseless according to me because of two reasons. One, this consequence is based upon the assumption (rather fact) that parents of students today are crazy just about the brand IIT, whatever the course may be. And two, I agree commerce and humanities are treated with disdain and there is an urgent need to remove this bias, but I feel this is not the right way. For example, would you compare a literature or economics student from Oxford or Cambridge with an engineering graduate from MIT or CalTech? You simply cannot, because they are just different, as different as apples and oranges. We should aim for a similar educational structure with world-class institutions established for all fields. Does MIT have a bachelor’s course in literature? If it has, would you be as awed as you would be of an engineering graduate from MIT? So instead of offering other courses in IITs, let us create new premier institutes for these courses. In fact, this should have been done long ago. If they are anyway planning to open new IITs, they can instead open IIMSs (Indian Institute of Medical Sciences, for example) instead.

Even in terms of infrastructure, the present IITs are almost exploding with students, struggling to cope with the increase in intake of students every year. I have the privilege of living in the campus of an IIT myself, and I have seen and appreciated the flora and fauna of the campus. In most of the cities where IITs are situated, the IIT is located in one of the greenest areas of the city. Expanding an IIT would mean that a lot of trees would have to be cut down, as a result of which an IIT loses one of its charms.

Bottom line is, instead of exploiting the people’s love for the word IIT by opening a lot of them, why don’t you try diverting it to IIMS or NLS? This will do good to a lot of students who would have otherwise ruined their life taking up engineering simply because there aren’t enough opportunities for them to pursue their higher studies in the field of their choice in a premier institute.

P.S. I have never intended to discriminate between students of any stream/discipline or treat a law/commerce/humanities student with contempt. Please don’t treat this as the high-handed rant of an IITian, just treat this as a commoners viewpoint on such a move. If this has caused offence to anyone, I apologize.