Delinking merit and quota is the right call

For decades, groups opposed to India’s castebased affirmative action policy have argued, with little proof, that reserving seats for marginalised communities in educational institutions and employment is antithetical to the spirit of equality and merit, and hurts the country’s progress. On Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected that argument. In upholding 27% of seats reserved for Other Backward Classes (OBC) in the all-India quota of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), a bench of justices DY Chandrachud and AS Bopanna held that reservation furthered the distributive consequences of social justice. The top court said that exams were not a proxy for merit because they did not reflect the economic and social advantage accrued to some groups. Merit should be socially contextualised, the judges added.

Empirical research has countered the myth of merit. In a 2020 paper on the Indian bureaucracy, researchers Rikhil Bhavnani and Alexander Lee found that disadvantaged group members recruited via affirmative action performed no worse than others. A second paper, by Ashwini Deshpande and Thomas Weisskop in 2014 on the Indian Railways, found no evidence that a higher proportion of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the workforce reduced efficiency, and suggested that labour force diversity boosted productivity.

Affirmative action provides an avenue for historically marginalised communities to counter social, economic, and institutional biases. In a society where prejudices of caste and lineage are rife, it gives an opportunity for people to become a part of the national growth. Conducting a reservation-less competitive examination without ensuring equality of opportunity is contrary to the idea of fairness. The Supreme Court is right to delink quotas and merit.