There is already so much being said about why reservation is bad in our education system that probably you won’t even feel like reading this article.
But this time there is more to it.
Almost everyone has a basic idea of the high percentage of seats reserved in the ITTs and NITs, but did you know that in IIMs, it’s even worse?
One of the most premier institutes of India takes severe blows of reservation every year.
In an RTI report, IIM-Ahmadabad released the statistical figures of the cut-off percentile set by the institution (Source for image).
It is shocking to know that the cut-off for the reserved categories is only going down further instead of increasing. For the batch 2013-2015, the required percentile for a ST student was just 38.34, where as a student belonging to the general category had to score 98.28 percentile to stand a chance of having a shot at the college.
This comes as a huge blow for the hard working students who are competent enough to get an admission, but not good enough to fight reservation.
The other factor which raises a lot of concern apart from such low cut-offs is the huge number of seats reserved for SCs, STs and OBCs. All IIMs are supposed to reserve 49.4 percent seats for students coming from these backgrounds. We cannot even compare the ratio of students to seats, in general with the other category. The difference is humungous.
Even for the OBC quota, the cut-off falls down by almost 10 percentile from that of the general category.
Another astonishing fact which can be observed from the 2013 results is that 95,000 out 1.74 lakh students scored a zero. (Source) This means that the candidate who didn’t attempt a single answer also got a percentile of 55. So if a candidate who belongs to the quota section, just goes there and writes his name, and doesn’t attempt any question, will also be able to clear the cut-off easily. That’s the level to which the standard has gone down.
The quota system was supposed to help the backward classes in overcoming the barriers which was once created by our society. But what it is doing instead is bring down quality of education.
You don’t have to be an expert to understand that a student who gets 90 percentile must be way more hard working and deserving, than a student who gets 50 percentile and gets admission in the same college. Naturally, the standard of the education goes down.
If IIMs want to maintain their reputation of being one of India’s best institutes, then they have to do something about high extent of reservation which exists in the admission procedure.
A strong step needs to be taken to ensure that all the brilliant candidates get a college which they actually deserve, without facing the heat of reservation.
