What do you think about reservation?
Dr Kapil Yadav: Reservation is not the only solution.
Dr R K Prasad: The OBCs in villages and those in the cities are entirely different. It is acceptable that many of them are very well off but in rural areas there are still many problems. Definitely, society needs a mechanism to pull them up because unfortunately you don't have any alternate mechanism.
Seventy-two hours after the anti-reservation stir began, there was a demand to rollback the entire reservation policy. That itself shows it is a conspiracy.
If Parliament is debating this issue and to my knowledge nobody has opposed it, why was it so that the agitation was only started by doctors? Why not engineers, MBA students, the Arts faculty? Why it is that only the medical profession got so angered with the reservation policy?
Dr Rajesh Paswan: The construction of the Dalit middle class has happened due to reservation. Their position has improved with the aid of reservation -- politics, jobs, petrol pumps etc. Where there is no reservation they are not very successful.
Shouldn't the creamy layer among the SCs/STs/OBCs be kept out of reservation?
Dr Rajesh Paswan: No. They should not get reservation. The most backward castes among OBCs should get reservation like the small communities that have very low literacy rates, no political godfathers and are only used as vote banks. If you give reservation to a capable person it will be difficult to justify reservation.
Dr R K Prasad: In the context of SCs/STs, the concept of a creamy layer is absurd. If you look at the implementation of the reservation policy for the last 50 years, it is categorically stated and the government itself has accepted that less than 10 per cent seats have been fulfilled.
The creamy layer in SCs/STs is a very smart logic -- the educated people will not get it because they fall into the creamy layer, and the uneducated will not get it anyway because he is uneducated. So instead of saying I will not give it to you, they are splitting it in a very beautiful manner.
If you look at the break-up, less than 10 per cent seats are for Class I jobs. For Class 2 and Class 3 jobs, it is around 4 to 5 per cent. If you calculate the total number of seats advertised and the quota filled for the last 50 years, the SCs/STs have lost 1 crore jobs.
Can you imagine the magnitude of injustice to the Dalit community? Had it been given to the justified and rightful people, there would be a remarkable change in society.
The benefit of reservation has itself not reached needy people because of the criminal conspiracy of the ruling class.
Image: Dr B R Ambedkar's poster hangs at the Ambedkar library at AIIMS.
Also read: The middle class deserves what it is getting
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