Discrepancy in reservation

Editorial, Central Chronicle - 19th August 2009

Large-scale discrepancies are witnessed many times in the provisions and systems of reservation for the backward classes of the society introduced to provide an educational base for their uplift. Due to this, the students suffer heavy losses in the highly commercial areas. The educational capacity of the State also goes waste. This has now become clear that the State governments overlook the ground reality due to over enthusiasm for the reservation and as a consequence damaging the education heavily. Same kind of system and irregularity has come to light in engineering education in Madhya Pradesh. There are 8000 seats reserved for the SCST students in the engineering colleges of the state. Only 2000 students of this category turned up for admission against these seats, because of which 6000 seats in the engineering colleges would remain vacant during the entire year. Since these vacant seats cannot be filled by allowing admission for the students of general category, there seems to be no sense that thousands of the aspiring students in the state can not be given admission just because they belong to the general category. This ironical situation sums up the fact that the reservation quota has been fixed more than the necessity. These 6000 seats, which are going to remain vacant, would hamper the prospects of becoming engineer for the same number of student.