Caste reservation

Lower caste students are forced to sit separately from upper caste for their mid-day meal in a government school in Junagadh, Gujarat and such ugly practices prevail elsewhere also. The Director of District Primary Education Project (DEPP), Mr Mahesh Singh has told the Press at the end of the "Chintan Shibir" for teachers, principals and education department officials that if the children of all castes are made to sit together, many upper caste parents would withdraw their wards from the school. 

These incidents confirm the survey on untouchability in India in 2016. Researchers from Jawaharlal Nehru University and University of Maryland have covered 42,152 households across our country. A whopping 27 per cent of the members of those households shamelessly declare that they practice untouchability. There must be some more people who cling to such inhuman prejudices without categorically declaring it to a study team for the fear of legal actions against them. This shows that a large section of our people are still carrying almost same horrifying apathy against Dalits as our ancestors.

We can now recall that a few days ago, a woman teacher in Amreli thrashed her Head Master on being asked for stationery by her Dalit superior. These incidents and the attack on the Bastar-based academic and researcher Bela Bhatia, explain why we fail Dalits and their champions as well. This is the reason why India still needs job reservation for the Dalits not for giving them jobs but for the sake of social justice and to make our administration free from caste bias. It goes without saying that any administrative bias against Dalits cannot act as a deterrent to stop rising incidents like Una, Bastar, Junagadh and Amreli. 

Caste reservation is confined only to government sector which is a tiny part of total job market. If the idea behind the caste reservation is to provide just employment to Dalits then such reservation would have been extended to private sector also. As a matter of fact, reservation for the Dalits, only for the government sector is just to ensure proportional representation of Dalits in every police station, government office and legislative body so that they can save themselves in a country where they are still being agonisingly ill-treated.