corruption india

HRD looks to use unique IDs in curbing fake degree menace. (2009, August 23). Times of India.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4923226.cms

Mahatma Gandhi University staff to launch protests. (2005, November 8). The Hindu.

http://www.hindu.com/2005/11/08/stories/2005110812920300.htm

Saurashtra University cracks down on fake certificates. (2005, September 19). Hindustan Times.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/

CBI files case against former DCE student. (2005, July 20). The Hindu.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2005072106380301.htm&date=2005/07/21/&prd=th&

Policy unearth fake degree racket. (2005, May 27). The Hindu.


Khan, L. A. (2005, April 29). Check the authenticity of a certificate on the net. The Hindu.


PU staffer in fake degree racket. (2005, January 22). The Times of India.


Seethalakshmi S. (2004, October 8). Have a fake degree? Bye bye Dubai. The Times of India.


Overland, M. A. (2003, August 18). India's Supreme Court cracks down on 'profiteering' in higher education. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/08/2003081806n.htm

Paid subscription required.

Marksheets racket smashed. (2003, July 9). The Hindu.


Racket in fake marksheets unearthed, two arrested. (2003, June 18). The Hindu.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/2003/06/18/stories/2003061806780300.htm

Group in India seeks to end for-profit classes. (2003, May 16). The Chronicle of Higher Education, 49(36), p. A41.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i36/36a04102.htm


Thakur, P. (2002, December 10). Get fake degree, then go places. The Times of India.


Overland, M. A. (2002, July 5). India's higher-education watchdog. The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A48.



GRP busts fake degree racket. (2002, May 31). The Times of India.


7 Injured in attack on alleged cheaters in India. (2002, March 29). The Chronicle of Higher Education.



Overland, M. A. (2002, January 8). Indian police shut down business that was selling answers to medical-school exam. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

http://chronicle.com/daily/2002/01/2002010806n.htm


Fake certificate racket unearthed. (2000, July 1). The Hindu.


Fake degrees scam accused arrested. (2000, February 2). The Times of India.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:_aP8k4sC59wJ:www.iiep.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Research_Highlights_Corruption/pdf/En_Circulaci%25C3%25B3n__archivos_2001-2009.pdf+%22India%27s+Supreme+Court+Cracks+Down+on+%27Profiteering%27+in+Higher+Education&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShg5M1RTmKQXwSMRTx2yD6EQu2zaQU8axo5b07yWkkRd_SML4eVF9kpk9Exy4LgtijEZVsiNKP3MojxyVulOuBXzT3Zd_jY8MNg4kEJyVSwVAhFZlMUVtgempzG4M5IZLChiYM7&sig=AHIEtbTJySsdC152VRDzU6GzsXTynPI7yQ

http://www.petitiononline.com/kilgraft/petition.html

Begin removing bribes from Indian Education

http://www.petitiononline.com/kilgraft/petition.html

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:_aP8k4sC59wJ:www.iiep.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Research_Highlights_Corruption/pdf/En_Circulaci%25C3%25B3n__archivos_2001-2009.pdf+%22India's+Supreme+Court+Cracks+Down+on+'Profiteering'+in+Higher+Education&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShg5M1RTmKQXwSMRTx2yD6EQu2zaQU8axo5b07yWkkRd_SML4eVF9kpk9Exy4LgtijEZVsiNKP3MojxyVulOuBXzT3Zd_jY8MNg4kEJyVSwVAhFZlMUVtgempzG4M5IZLChiYM7&sig=AHIEtbTJySsdC152VRDzU6GzsXTynPI7yQ



http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/

View Current Signatures - Sign the Petition

To: Those who make laws for India as well as to those who interpret and enforce them

Transparency International India carried out India’s largest ever corruption survey two years back. Result was that Government run schools up to XII standard with Rs.4,137 crore in yearly bribe money topped every other sector of Indian public life including Indian Police force figures for which was Rs 3,899 crore .

As per reports Rs.4,137 crore does not include corruption of government aided private schools. Most private schools receive their secondary and higher secondary school teachers' salary plus administrative expenses from government. Figure certainly does not include bribes teachers have to pay to be hired in school, percentage of salary eaten up by the school managements in league with Education Officers and their political masters, nor does it include private tuitions school teachers force on their pupils during 9th to 12th standard or bribes parents pay to secure higher grades for their children in Board Examinations.

Please read Corruption Catalogue of School System at http://www.livemint.com/2007/05/02165316/5DC18025-9127-4A90-AEE9-D425E25EC7CBArtVPF.pdf

Total yearly bribes in Indian public life comes to Rs 21,068 crore that is over five billion US dollars. Please read http://southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/114625/1/85 & http://www.infochangeindia.org/features287.jsp

If over a hundred years old British made law is scrapped bribes from Indian Education can begin to get removed.

The law requires a student to come to higher education through head of a government-recognised school.

No such law exists in UK, USA, France to my knowledge. In fact in USA children of Indian immigrants often make news for performing extraordinarily in academics without ever enrolling in any government or private school there. Their parents coach them at home until they enter college or university.

Why not allow students in India to sit at higher education entrance tests even if instead of having been enrolled in a government recognised school they have prepared themselves only through coaching classes or with help of anybody or any tool such as Internet?

Bribes in Indian education breaks spirits of generations after generations of educated Indians.

Please get the British made law scrapped to let Indian youngsters taste honesty in the life building process of learning from their teachers.

I have written to every one in Sam Pitroda headed and Dr. Manmohan Singh government set up National Knowledge Commission http://knowledgecommission.gov.in/, as well as to Mukesh Ambani and Kumarmangalam Birla of Special Subject Group set up by Vajpayee government to receive reform advice on education http://indiaimage.nic.in/pmcouncils/reports/education/, and of course to number of Prime Ministers and Presidents including the current ones.

Obviously there being no response I request every one of you and your contacts to join me in this petition by signing it, also please get this petition publicised in whatever media you can.

Scrapping the unnecessary law in first instance will remove the children of better off Indian parents from bribes in education. They will no more be forced to attend classes in schools wherein teachers twist

students so they get trapped in their tuition classes outside of school hours. These students already attend private tuition or coaching classes. They do want to be exempted from school classes where teachers do not teach.

More such students start abstaining from school classes; corruption of schools will start getting into focus. On one hand schools will have to improve and on the other hand enterprising teachers will begin to run their business of teaching away from government-subsidised schools.

If other professionals are free to run their professions according to market forces why prevent teachers from doing the same?

Scrapping the law, besides liberating young Indian spirits will show the direction to free up India from culture of bribes in other sectors of Indian public life.

Dayashankar Mohanlal Joshi Ph. D.(Pennsylvania USA 1969)

20 Gayton Court, Gayton Road, Harrow, HA1 2HB, United Kingdom

[email protected]

Sincerely,

'If the politicians are corrupt, so too will be the people'

http://infochangeindia.org/200507205469/Governance/Features/-If-the-politicians-are-corrupt-so-too-will-be-the-people.html

http://www.karmayog.org/anticorruption/

Moral values must prevail

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/specials/tribune_125/main6.htm

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/specials/tribune_125/main6.htm

http://www.karmayog.org/anticorruption/



Root Cause of Corruption in India

http://vajrapani.sulekha.com/blog/post/2007/04/root-cause-of-corruption-in-india.htm

Apr 1 2007 | Views 4790 | Comments (1) | Report Abuse

Tags: corruption india politics hindu hindus integrity citizen citizenship bharat slaves creed creeds religion religions culture cultures tradition traditions

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Everyone will agree that we are one of the most corrupt nations on Earth. There is corruption in every dimension of human endeavour. So much so that we are sometimes surprised when we find some person or circumstance where there is no scope for corruption!

We need to adopt a scientific attitude and process to eliminate this malady from our society, mere calls for integrity are useless. We need to study and understand those individuals and systems where there is no scope for corruption and replicate/roll-out those models for the rest of the population and institutions.

First let us review the qualities of individuals of integrity.

1. Self-respect is one of the most important of the common qualities of men/women of integrity. They are content with what their qualification and work can fetch them. And if their present state does not meet their ambition, they will strive to improve in a legitimate way.

2. They love themselves, their families and the mother land.

3. They do not exhibit such cheap behaviour as throwing thrash in their neighbour's plot, elbowing others to beat the queue, jump the traffic signal etc. Instead and they are calm and composed in public, follow rules and desire harmony in society.

4. While some of them oppose corruption publicly, others are content to be clean themselves and leave the others' behaviour to their own conscience. But the latter is not due thier acceptance of corruption, but because of practical limitations in constantly opposing an overwhelming majority of people.

Let us now review the qualities of institutions of integrity.

1. Honesty is their policy. It is the cornerstone of their business existence.

2. They build and tune their systems to be resilient enough not to fall prey to human weaknesses and inadequacies.

3. They rely on innovation and continuous improvement rather than questionable business practices.

4. They respect the interests of their customers, stake holders and employees. Their policies and procedures are tuned to imbibe responsibility and accountability in every individual.

5. Unscrupulous individuals will find it difficult to survive and grow in such institutions as the system demands accountability.

Now, though an institution is greater than an individual, it is individuals who form, contitute and run insitutions. Hence, let us see why our country is failing in producing individuals of integrity.

The main reason why our country is failing to produce individuals of integrity is because of Lack of Intellectual Independence. Sitting at the top of our national executive are mere parrots who will simply speak out what they have learnt by rote. All that they know is to imitate and follow the legacy of our erstwhile colonial masters. There is a very subtle problem here - all those pre-independence things were first put in place to make us loyal servants of our colonial masters, and prevent us from becoming authors and masters of our own destiny.

For example, take our social studies text books, while they heap condemnation on all 'bad' aspects of our culture and tradition, they have absolutely nothing worthy to highlight in a positive way. As a result, an average Indian is led to believe that our inheritance is evil and we need to "reform" - that is change in a way mostly acceptable for our western audience.

But even while the text books condemn and call to abandon all aspects of our native culture, they un-conditionally extoll the 'virtues' of foreign cultures and creeds. Our text books scrupulously avoid being critical of any aspect of foreign cultures/creeds. This results in an average citizen developing the attitude of being inimical to the country's own culture and tradition - that is to towards his own fellow citizens of the native culture and tradition - while they are timidly respective of foreigners and other fellow citizens following colonial/foreign cultures/traditions.

This behaviour is seen even more in our mainstream media (mainly English). Another simple example - especially of common knowledge to frequent fliers - is that most Indians scrupulously follow the Q system outside India, while they will resort their normal 'elbow thy neighbour' the moment they touch-down back home.

To sum it up our current educational system will continue to create good slaves of foreign masters, but cannot create good masters of our own destiny. Coming to the un-educated, they simply follow the behaviour of their educated peers.

Once we achieve Intellectual Independence, everything else will fall in place. Individuals of integrity have their role to play - to write about what is good about them and their motherland.

http://www.kar.nic.in/lokayukta/preact.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevention_of_Corruption_Act

http://upscportal.com/civilservices/essay/An-Essay-Corruption-in-India

December 6, 2002

India's Supreme Court Supports Quotas

http://upscportal.com/civilservices/essay/An-Essay-Corruption-in-India

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevention_of_Corruption_Act

http://www.kar.nic.in/lokayukta/preact.htm

By MARTHA ANN OVERLAND

In a landmark decision, India's Supreme Court has upheld the right of colleges that are administered by minority groups to use quotas based on religion and language when admitting students. But the court also ruled that state governments could impose regulatory measures in order to ensure a minimum level of academic excellence, even at minority-administered educational institutions that do not receive any government funds.

The ruling settled a politically sensitive dispute over whether minority groups had the right to operate schools and colleges without state interference. While the court agreed that minority institutions could continue to set aside seats for members of their own groups, it also said that their admissions decisions "ought not to ignore the merit of the students."

The ruling was handed down last month by 11 justices who convened last year to examine more than 200 petitions filed by a diverse group of colleges and public-interest groups. The petitioners had sought clarification of the meaning of the term "minorities" and of the right of minority groups to set up their own colleges without government oversight. Many were hoping that the court would also define "religion" and "education," but the justices sidestepped those questions.

Minority groups in India, such as Christians and Muslims, have a long tradition of setting up and administering their own schools and colleges. Indeed, that right is laid out in Article 30 of India's Constitution. It was intended to ensure that the majority would not suffocate minority groups when state lines were drawn at the time India became a nation.

Yet Article 29 of the Constitution states that "no citizen shall be denied admission into any educational institution maintained by the state or receiving aid out of state funds on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language, or any of them." So while the court let stand a 1993 decision allowing colleges that receive some government money to reserve seats for their own members, it said that those institutions would have to admit a reasonable number of students from the majority to ensure that their rights under Article 29 were not infringed.

Critics of the court's decision complained that the ruling was vague. The notion of "reasonable" is open to interpretation, argued Jitendra Shah, a member of the Forum for Fairness in Education, a watchdog group based in Bombay. He is no fan of minority-run institutions because, he said, unlike India's public

universities, they do not admit students based on merit and they reinforce ethnic, religious, and language divisions. Mr. Shah was hoping for a decision that would at least curb the growth of private, minority colleges of dubious quality that have mushroomed in the past 10 years. Because they charge high tuition fees, they are huge moneymakers, he says, and they are often set up by politicians who profit through a relationship with the college. Mr. Shah has little faith that the states, now that they have been given the right to exercise minimum control over private minority colleges, will actually do so.

"We know how these things have been operated by the state in the past," said Mr. Shah, a professor at an engineering college. "There will be under-the-table negotiations and political deals by the vested interests so they can continue to work just as they did before."

http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 49, Issue 15, Page A42

http://chronicle.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/article/Indias-Supreme-Court-Suppo/9976/

September 5, 2003

Indian Court Bans Colleges' 'Profiteering'

http://chronicle.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/article/Indian-Court-Bans-Colleges/23523/


In a decision intended to curb the widespread sale of places in professional colleges, India's Supreme Court ordered last month that private institutions may no longer demand the "donation" of extra, up

front fees from new students.

The court also ruled that tuition must be scrutinized by a committee of experts.

In recent years, professional educational institutions have proliferated in India. Many are operated as for-profit businesses and are of dubious quality. They have sprouted up to meet the call for higher

education by a growing middle class that can afford the cost of private institutions.

Medical and engineering colleges now demand "capitation fees," or upfront payments of tens of thousands of dollars, from students whose test scores do not qualify them for places, which has

essentially resulted in the sale of seats.

Despite the ban on such fees, the colleges will still be permitted to set their own fee structures. But the court stipulated that each state government must set up a high-level committee to review tuition rates

to determine if they are reasonable. That standard is to be based on the cost of the college's infrastructure, investments, and salaries. "The committee shall then decide whether the fees proposed

by that institution are justified and are not profiteering or charging capitation fees," the court said.

The judges also reaffirmed an earlier Supreme Court decision that private colleges -- which had been set up along religious and ethnic lines to educate members of specific groups -- could admit a certain

number of students based on religion and language. Students in those categories do not have to meet the minimum academic requirements but are charged the hefty capitation fees.

Many states had limited the proportion of those seats to 25 percent. The new ruling, however, permits all colleges to control 50 percent of the seats in the 2003-4 academic year.

That part of the court's decision is a blow to education reformers like Bhagvanji Raiyani, who founded the Forum for Fairness in Education, an advocacy group. He said the quotas essentially permit the sale of

seats to students who would otherwise not qualify for admission. Allowing colleges to control more seats offers more opportunities for profiteering, he said.

He predicted that donations will still be demanded, but that now the transactions will be under the table, as they are in states where the practice was already banned by local courts. "All admissions should

be based on merit," Mr. Raiyani said. "The Supreme Court judgment is contradictory to its own judgment."


September 26, 2003

Tripling of Medical Tuition Draws Protests in Bombay

http://chronicle.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/article/Tripling-of-Medical-Tuition/11101/


Angry parents and frustrated students clashed with police in Bombay this month after private medical schools tripled tuition, forcing the government to suspend the admissions process for the third time in as many months.

The protests began after hundreds of students and their families arrived in the city to register for medical school. Most were shocked when they learned that annual tuition had jumped to $7,500 -- far beyond the means of most Indians. With no way to raise the money, some students were in tears.

To help ease the financial burden, the Bombay High Court had ruled a few days earlier that students could pay 60 percent of the proposed fees when they registered. They would have to pay the remainder when the tuition increase was approved by a government committee, a requirement recently laid down by India's Supreme Court in a case involving private professional colleges.

The announcement failed to mollify parents and students who said they had already borrowed heavily.

Waiting for the Courts

For a week, the families of the students remained outside the central admissions office at St. George's Hospital, which is run by the Maharashtra state government. Many had come great distances to Bombay, also known as Mumbai, solely to register their children. Those with limited travel money were forced to sleep on railway-station platforms while they waited to see if there would be any relief from the courts.

In an effort to calm the growing protests, groups of private medical colleges said they would appoint a committee to review the fees. Parents were outraged when it was revealed that the panel was

composed of three government ministers who own, and thereby profit from, private professional colleges.

The protests grew when the families were joined by local political parties and youth groups. Demonstrators blocked the entrance to St. George's Hospital as well as the entrance to Bombay University. Police used batons to break up the protests.

Soon after, the Bombay High Court gave the state permission to suspend admissions for one week while state officials and private-college administrators met to see if they could resolve the tuition crisis.

Medical admissions have been in disarray as the Bombay court and India's Supreme Court try to grapple with the problem of "profiteering" by private professional colleges that have sprung up in India. Last month the Supreme Court ruled that the private colleges could no longer demand one-time, upfront fees from students. But in a concession to the colleges, the court allowed them to set their own tuitions. In response, tuition for the 50 percent of seats that the government says must be allocated on a merit basis -- which are intended for needy and middle-class students -- jumped from about $2,500 to $7,500 per year.


In India, Almost Everyone Wants to Be Special


The world's most sweeping quota system remains popular even though its effectiveness is being questioned

Article: The Quota Quandary

Article: In Brazil, a New Debate Over Color

Article: In Malaysia, the End of QuotasBy MARTHA ANN OVERLAND

As a child, Rajkumar was often told that he was not welcome at the government school. "My teachers said an education was wasted on a Chamar," he said, referring to those traditionally relegated to skinning animals, one of the most degrading tasks in Hinduism. "'Why do you come to school? You should be sweeping the roads,' they said. They told us to go to the fields to collect fodder for their cattle."

Forced to sit in the back of the class and beaten for even minor infractions, few of the children from the caste group known as untouchables, or Dalits, stayed in school long enough to learn to read and write. Rajkumar, 33, was one of the few Dalits to graduate from his school, and one of the rare few in his village to ever go on to college.

Today Rajkumar, who uses only a single name to avoid revealing his caste, is an assistant professor of politics at Dayal Singh College. He drives a new Indian car and lives in a mixed-caste neighborhood in the modern urban jumble of New Delhi. As far as he knows, no one performs a cleansing ritual after shaking his hand.

In many ways Rajkumar is living the Indian dream. But he says he is under no illusion about how he got here. Drive and determination can rarely overcome thousands of years of economic and social discrimination. Without India's quota system, which reserves places in college for students from his caste, he says, he would be working in the fields and living in abject poverty as a virtual slave to the upper-caste landowners in his village.

In much of the world, quota is a dirty word. Not so in India. For more than half a century, India has operated the most sweeping affirmative-action program in the world. The Constitution, written shortly after India gained independence from Britain in 1947, guarantees that nearly a quarter of all government jobs and student places in higher education are reserved for untouchables and members of India's indigenous tribal groups.

But quotas, or reservations as they are known here, did not stop there. The leaders of the newly independent nation believed the system could help solve myriad intransigent social and political problems. One of the greatest concerns was that the Hindu majority would swallow up India's religious and ethnic minorities. One way to protect their cultural identities was to allow them to set up their own colleges and professional schools. The Constitution permits them to set aside places for their own

members, even if the schools are financed completely by the government. The Supreme Court, trying to bring some order to the system, recently capped the number at 50 percent.

Quotas have also become a way to reward the nation's heroes, and, it seems, everyone else. So today one can find university seats reserved for descendants of those who fought to oust the British from India, children of parents who died while battling to save the Tamil language, and the offspring of farmers who develop award-winning crops. Universities also set aside places for students with specific physical handicaps and those with special talents at playing sports. Of course, a certain percentage of all of those categories must be women. In some states, depending upon the ethnic and religious makeup, 80 percent of the population qualifies for a quota.

Confused? Many people are. Over the years, the courts have tried to clarify the rules and make the system fairer. It is generally agreed they have only muddled things further. The situation is exacerbated by a massive shortage of places in government-supported colleges, the only ones most Indians can afford. But unlike in the United States, where critics argue that quotas are no longer needed, in India, affirmative action is practically considered a right.

Indeed, rather than trying to get rid of them, groups that have been left out are today clamoring for a quota of their own.

Little Change in Society

Poulomi Bhowmick, who belongs to the Brahmins, the highest caste group, and is a student at the University of Delhi, says the reservation system has created an impossible situation. She and her friends applied to more than 30 colleges, each with its own admissions standards, its own quotas, and its own application. Getting admitted has little to do, Ms. Bhowmick complains, with what you want to study but rather which major you think you can make it into.

"A lot of us were left demoralized," she says, referring to the complicated admissions process, in which students who don't qualify for any quotas find themselves competing for a handful of places. "Every college and every different course has their own quotas. In some programs there were just three seats left for the general category. The whole thing is insane."

On the other hand, Uma Bhushan, a lower-caste student at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, in New Delhi, insists that India's affirmative-action program is a necessity because discrimination against Dalits and indigenous people remains as pernicious and as pervasive as ever. "If anything, I would increase reservations for the scheduled castes," he said, using the term for the castes who are on the government's list, or schedule. "Over the years more castes have been added to the list of who is eligible, but the percentage has remained at 22.5 percent."

Indeed, despite the world's most progressive quota system, not much has changed for India's marginalized populations over the past half-century. Most of the nation's 160 million Dalits still live below the poverty line, in villages where they are relegated to disposing of human feces and animal carcasses.

Although discrimination against untouchables was outlawed decades ago, they live in segregated areas and are often barred from drawing water from the village well or praying in the village temple. They are frequently victims of physical attacks, which are rarely prosecuted because the police and the courts are dominated by the upper castes.

Because of the poverty that pressures parents to send their children to work, as well the daily humiliations meted out to them in school, half of all Dalit children fail to complete their elementary education. According to Umakant, a senior researcher at the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, an academic think tank in New Delhi, only a quarter of them will make it through high school. Nationwide, the literacy rate for Dalits is just 37 percent compared with 57 percent for non-Dalits. In states where Dalits suffer the most discrimination, the literacy rate among girls is as low as 7 percent.

"How can you expect with these circumstances that Dalits rise in their lives, rise in higher education?" asks Umakant, who also uses only one name to avoid identifying his caste designation.

The number of Dalits in higher education bears this out. According to a 2000 survey by the University Grants Commission, the government body that finances and regulates higher education in India, Dalits are vastly underrepresented in the nation's colleges and universities. Although 15 percent of places are reserved for them, Dalits compose only 8.3 percent of the total number of undergraduate students. At the Ph.D. level, the portion drops to 2.7 percent. The Rajkumars and the Umakants remain a statistical rarity.

To Arnab Dasgupta, an English honors student at the University of Delhi, those statistics are proof that quotas have failed to lift up India's most downtrodden. "These days reservations are more about games being played by the political parties," says Mr. Dasgupta, who is from an upper caste. "The leaders are using them as vote banks," he says, with politicians promising their constituents quotas if they are elected.

If India truly wants to become a classless society, it will have to get rid of quotas, which essentially sanction class divisions, argues Mr. Dasgupta. He would like to see the government end the reservation system and base university admissions solely on merit. At the same time, the government still needs to encourage underprivileged students to go to college, so he suggests that they create a system of scholarships similar to that in the United States.

The idea of ending quotas does not sit well with Dalit leaders such as Sukhadeo K. Thorat, a professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi. Just as the government takes measures when there is a market failure -- such as preventing unfair monopolies, creating employment programs, and ensuring fair trade -- Mr. Thorat says it must also intercede when there is a social collapse. He believes one of the best ways to do that is through the reservations system, which is a mechanism to provide protection to and promote certain groups.

"The U.S. is wrong," Mr. Thorat emphatically states, referring to the move there to end affirmative action. "If the majority excludes based on color, caste, or religion, the government has to intervene and provide protection against discriminatory behavior. What is the basis of reservations? It's the systematic exclusion by the majority. It's discrimination leading to deprivation. It is not poverty itself."

Quotas for All

Despite the grumbling against quotas, there is no groundswell of support to end them. Because of the size of the groups affected, the mere suggestion of ending reservations would be political suicide. Instead, there is now a push to expand affirmative action to groups that feel they have been squeezed out.

"We should be given reservations," argues Anu Priya Dogra, who is working on her master's at the Delhi School of Economics. Ms. Dogra is a Rajput, a descendant of one of the royal families that once ruled much of northern India. There are no quotas for those from her upper caste, which she regards as

unfair. Ms. Dogra had to get into college based solely on merit. "They easily get everything," she says of the low-caste groups that fall under the quotas. "We get nothing. And we are the ones with potential."

Even though Ms. Dogra complains about the system, she does not advocate abolishing quotas. She simply wants one for herself. "We should be given reservations," she says. "Either everyone should get reservations or no one should."

Last May many in the country were taken aback when politicians in the state of Rajasthan demanded that poor Brahmins be given their own quota. The move was initially dismissed as a political ploy by local politicians who have large numbers of upper-caste members in their districts.

But now national parties, looking for votes, are taking the demand seriously. Following in the footsteps of the upper castes, Muslim groups are pressing for similar concessions.

The notion of quotas for "economically backward" groups only illustrates that people don't understand what it means to be an untouchable, says Bizay Sonkar Shastri, chairman of the government's National Commission on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

Every day the commission receives more than a hundred petitions from Dalits and tribal members, alleging atrocities against them. Typically, Mr. Shastri looks into reports of gang rapes against Dalit women and attacks on villagers who didn't obey upper-caste leaders. In one of the most shocking cases, five Dalits were beaten and then lynched outside a police station after rumors circulated that they were skinning a cow, an animal sacred to Hindus. The murdered men were Chamars -- the same caste as Rajkumar, the New Delhi college professor.

"Fifty years after untouchability was outlawed, we are still the most backward, we suffer the most starvation, have the highest number of deaths, and are hated by the other castes," says Mr. Shastri. "It is not only about economic upliftment. It is for social empowerment."


http://chronicle.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/article/In-India-Almost-Everyone-W/3612/

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