Affirmative Action In India: A New Paradigm

Abstract

This policy paper examines two structural weaknesses in India's affirmative action framework: reservations and targeted welfare schemes. It argues that neither instrument, in its present form, does enough to dismantle caste-based disadvantage on the ground, most acutely in rural India. The central claim is that the problem is one of design and implementation rather than intent: the system relies almost wholly on a single ascriptive marker, caste, without a graded measure of relative disadvantage, and it has been progressively politicised into an instrument for electoral mobilisation. As a result benefits are distributed unevenly within the target groups, the genuinely worst off are frequently missed, and the administration lacks the granular data needed to know who is being denied what. This paper proposes a new paradigm built on four ideas: sub-classification within reserved categories to reach the least represented, exclusion of the creamy layer supported by empirical indices of backwardness, a composite disadvantage factor that combines family history, income and community-level barriers, and a grassroots social-harmony architecture that couples panchayat scrutiny with a Pan-India community development mission. Recent developments give this argument fresh weight. In August 2024 a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court held that sub-classification within the Scheduled Castes is constitutionally permissible when justified by quantifiable data, and endorsed extending the creamy-layer principle to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. In October 2023 Bihar completed a caste-based enumeration of the kind this paper calls for. Crimes against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have continued to rise even as welfare outlays have grown. Together these signals suggest that the reforms argued for here are both feasible and overdue. The paper closes by forecasting the likely effects of the proposed measures on hate crime, rural governance and the quality of the data on which future policy must rest.

1. The two fault lines: problems with the current system

In India the difficulty with affirmative action has two dimensions: reservations and targeted welfare schemes. Both are severely hampered in their efforts to build a more inclusive society, and the failures of one compound the failures of the other.

1.1 Reservations

A political tool. There is a pervasive over-reliance on reservations as the whole answer to caste inequality. As successive political mobilisations have shown, contest concentrates on who qualifies and who does not, and governments frequently fail to correct the situation on any principled basis. Several scholars argue that the system, as operated, can entrench the very caste identities it was meant to transcend, because eligibility is fixed to caste membership rather than to demonstrated disadvantage.

Education and employment. There are long-running debates about reservations in higher education and in private organisations. Even setting aside the social friction such extensions generate, the arithmetic is a sobering reminder: extending quotas to the private sector would do relatively little to equalise access to good jobs, because the pool of high-quality formal employment is itself small and concentrated. The instrument reaches representation more easily than it reaches opportunity.

Loopholes. On several theoretical accounts, reservation as practised is confined to participation and leaves the underlying structure of power largely untouched. The near-exclusive reliance on a single ascriptive attribute, caste, inevitably produces perverse cases. Many people from non-listed groups face real social and educational deprivation, while some who can produce caste and non-creamy-layer credentials enjoy considerable social and educational advantage. Concerns have long been raised about the identification of creamy-layer Other Backward Classes and about schemes that fail to reach their intended populations. The Supreme Court itself has now recognised the force of this critique. In State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024) a seven-judge Constitution Bench held, by a six to one majority, that states may sub-classify within the Scheduled Castes to give preference to the most marginalised sub-groups, provided the classification rests on quantifiable and empirical data showing relative backwardness and inadequate representation. Four judges further endorsed applying a creamy-layer exclusion to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The judgment overruled the earlier position in E. V. Chinnaiah that the Scheduled Castes form a single homogeneous group that cannot be subdivided.

Merit. A familiar counter-argument to reservation invokes merit. Yet merit is a highly context-dependent idea in practice. The individual traits and socialisation that normalise abusive conduct towards patients, or religious intolerance in a hospital, are not captured by an entrance score, and it is precisely such traits that produce mediocrity and harm in a campus or a profession. A narrow, examination-only definition of merit mistakes a proxy for the quality it claims to measure.

1.2 Welfare schemes

Uneven distribution of benefits. The advantages of welfare schemes are dispersed unequally across the targeted groups. The absence of equal power structures at the local community level worsens this: those already better placed within a disadvantaged group capture a disproportionate share.

Persistent poverty among marginalised groups. Researchers at Harvard's Evidence for Policy Design analysed the changing social composition of the poor using time-series data from India's National Sample Survey between 1987 and 2011. Over that period the share of the poor drawn from Hindu lower castes, including the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, rose from roughly 33 to 40 per cent. The link between social backwardness and poverty is direct, and it is one the courts have acknowledged. In Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992) the nine-judge bench that upheld the Mandal Commission's 27 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes, fixed the 50 per cent ceiling and introduced the creamy-layer doctrine, observed that:

in the Indian context, social backwardness leads to educational backwardness, and both together lead to poverty, which in turn breeds and perpetuates the social and educational backwardness.

Thin allocation in education and scholarships. This raises hard questions about how a growing welfare budget is actually spent. A significant part of it flows to student scholarships, yet the National Commission for Scheduled Castes has reported that only a small minority of eligible students from the poorest backgrounds actually receive timely assistance. The Post-Matric Scholarship for Scheduled Caste students, the government's flagship instrument, is explicitly designed to raise the gross enrolment ratio of Scheduled Caste students in higher education by supporting those from the poorest households, which makes any shortfall in reach a direct constraint on mobility.

Exclusion at the local level. Poor educational facilities in villages have deepened the problem in rural areas. There is no single programme dedicated to improving community relations. Exclusion is so woven into social routine that excluded groups are often unaware of the extent to which they are being denied, and women and marginalised groups frequently withdraw from participation because of prevailing norms. Those most likely to be reached are frequently those who face the fewest disadvantages. A durable danger is the emergence of privileged sub-groups that corner the benefits of reservation, while women remain doubly disadvantaged within a reserved category and are sometimes targeted by their own families for marrying across caste lines.

Rising crimes despite rising spending. The most compelling evidence that the system is not delivering is that recorded atrocities keep climbing. According to the National Crime Records Bureau's Crime in India 2022 report, 57,582 cases of crime against Scheduled Castes were registered in 2022, an increase of 13.1 per cent over the 50,900 cases of 2021, and the crime rate rose from 25.3 to 28.6. Cases against Scheduled Tribes rose to 10,064, an increase of 14.3 per cent over 2021, with the rate climbing from 8.4 to 9.6. These figures extend a trend the earlier data already showed. This happens even as public spending on the welfare of these communities has grown year on year. The concern is therefore not primarily how much is allocated but how it is allocated and implemented. The problem is one of design and delivery, not of headline budgets.

Reservation, on this reading, has done too little to improve the equity and fairness of society or to give people a genuine route out of mutual contempt. The language of social justice is now so widely invoked that it can be wrapped around almost any position. The measurable achievement of social-justice politics has too often been the election of representatives from Dalit and Bahujan communities to office, with limited substantive gains for those communities themselves. Meanwhile serious demands have arisen from within the social-justice camp, most notably for the sub-classification of groups such as the Scheduled Castes and the Other Backward Classes so that a sub-quota can reach those who have gained least, and for a robust creamy-layer test. These are not attacks on affirmative action but attempts to make it work, and they raise the harder question of how to accommodate other axes of inequality, such as gender and class, that also shape opportunity.

2. The existing system of affirmative action in India

Reservations in India are provided in educational institutions, government posts and the legislatures. The system grew out of long-standing responses to caste hierarchy. Following the Poona Pact between B. R. Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi, certain seats within the Hindu electorate were reserved for the depressed classes. After independence large programmes were launched for the Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes and, after the Mandal Commission was constituted in 1979 and its recommendations later implemented, for the Other Backward Classes.

Various categories today receive reservation in central institutions: Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and, since the 103rd Constitutional Amendment of 2019, Economically Weaker Sections. That amendment marked a significant shift, because reservation had previously been justified by social and educational backwardness, whereas the Economically Weaker Sections quota rests on economic criteria alone. In Janhit Abhiyan v. Union of India (7 November 2022) the Supreme Court, by a three to two majority, upheld the amendment and the 10 per cent Economically Weaker Sections quota, treating economic disadvantage as a permissible basis for a separate class of beneficiaries. Persons with disabilities receive a separate reservation in government posts and educational institutions.

Selection in both university admissions and government recruitment turns on competitive written tests. Under the general quota the top-scoring candidates are admitted or recruited, after which officials move down the list admitting the highest-scoring Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Class candidates until each quota is filled or no further applicant clears a minimum threshold. The share of beneficiaries drawn from disadvantaged groups can therefore exceed or fall short of the nominal quota depending on how many clear the general cut-off, which is part of why scaling quota design across states is difficult.

The 50 per cent ceiling on reservations was fixed in Indra Sawhney, though the Economically Weaker Sections quota has since been read as sitting outside it. Earlier, in State of Madras v. Champakam Dorairajan, a communal reservation in state medical and engineering colleges that classified students by caste and religion was struck down, a decision that prompted the First Constitutional Amendment. More recently the Supreme Court struck down the Maharashtra reservation for the Maratha community in public education and employment for breaching the ceiling. Alongside reservations there are welfare schemes, but they too often fail to meet the needs of the most oppressed groups. They attempt to supply resources and education without altering the social composition of opportunity, and there is a recurring gap between an economic measure and an individual's or a community's social identity.

Underlying all of this is a data deficit. There is a widespread need for careful monitoring, assessment and data collection so that schemes can be launched with precision. There is at present a serious paucity of reliable, disaggregated data for studying caste-based disadvantage, particularly in rural India, which is one reason benefits are distributed unevenly even when resources reach a district. Bihar's caste-based survey, discussed below, is an early demonstration that this deficit can be addressed.

3. Policy solutions to the issues

3.1 Changes to reservations

Policy design must become more sophisticated so that it can register the degree, and not merely the fact, of relative disadvantage among beneficiaries. The National Commission for Backward Classes criterion for excluding the creamy layer, already used for employment reservation, could be extended to professional education, with the safeguard that vacant seats in the Other Backward Classes quota are offered to creamy-layer applicants only after non-creamy-layer candidates are exhausted. The 27 per cent quota could be shared between the more and the less advantaged Other Backward Classes. Many states already operate such a division, and a statutory body such as the National Commission for Backward Classes could be asked to prepare lists of upper and lower Other Backward Classes for the remaining states. This proposal now has direct judicial support: the reasoning in Davinder Singh (2024), that sub-classification is permissible where backed by empirical data, applies with equal force to graded quotas within the Other Backward Classes.

The design should include specific safeguards to ensure that women within each reserved category have genuine access to the quota, and a minimum qualifying standard for entry to super-specialty professional courses.

Data gathering. A nationwide survey of the social profile of higher education institutions and of employment in the organised sector should be commissioned from the National Sample Survey Office or an equivalent independent agency. Bihar has shown that such enumeration is feasible: its caste-based survey, released on 2 October 2023 and covering a population of over 130 million, found that the Extremely Backward Classes make up 36.01 per cent of the state, the Other Backward Classes 27.13 per cent, the Scheduled Castes 19.65 per cent, the Scheduled Tribes 1.68 per cent and the general castes 15.52 per cent. Data at this resolution is exactly what a graded, evidence-based reservation policy requires, and what the courts now demand before sub-classification is permitted.

A scientific approach. A more scientific method is needed to de-essentialise identity markers such as caste and religion. Grounding eligibility in measured disadvantage rather than birth gives a defensible reason why particular groups are entitled to compensatory treatment, and weakens the misreading of such entitlements as a permanent birthright rather than a remedy for a demonstrable gap.

Separate evaluation of urban and rural candidates. Candidates should be assessed with reference to the location of the school where they studied and sat their examinations. Zones can be defined using common indicators of backwardness, and in higher education caste and community can be assigned disadvantage points based on established empirical indices of relative backwardness rather than on category membership alone.

A disadvantage factor. Building on this, a single disadvantage factor could be constructed for each applicant that combines family history and income with the community-level barriers the applicant faces. This factor would then be combined with the merit factor from the examination to yield an overall score. Such a composite measure is the practical mechanism through which the Court's requirement of quantifiable data could be operationalised at the level of the individual candidate.

3.2 Targeted social welfare

Stronger scrutiny of panchayats. Bringing panchayats under closer scrutiny by higher authorities would contribute to the steady dismantling of caste-based prejudice. Where a hate crime is reported by an individual and verified by the local police station, the conduct of the relevant panchayat in the matter should itself be reviewed, so that local bodies have a direct incentive to prevent and address discrimination rather than tolerate it.

Monitoring and assessment. A broader remedy would be to establish a standing committee, drawn from both government and opposition and including subject specialists, to monitor and report a social-harmony index, particularly for rural areas. The committee would prepare reports at panchayat, block and district level. The job situation, health and sanitation facilities, the prevalence of hate crimes against disadvantaged groups, the net attendance ratio and the availability of government programmes could all serve as indicators for this social-harmony report and index.

Panchayats, blocks and districts could be recognised and rewarded for measurable improvements, creating conditions in which the local administration is more willing to take responsibility. Accountability would sit closer to the community, where discrimination is actually experienced.

Data gathering from the social-harmony report. As matters stand, government and research bodies face either a severe shortage of accumulated data for studying social dynamics or a confusing surplus of disparate reports. A consistent social-harmony report and index would become a reliable, standardised source for later analysis, comprehensive across domains and comparable over time, which would help correct problems at different points and of different kinds.

A community development programme. A Pan-India 'Samanata Mission' could be launched in stages to fill the gap in social integration and communal peace, a gap that no existing programme squarely addresses. The mission would feature a periodic 'Samanata Parv' convened in the name of the District Magistrate, bringing communities together through a fair, a shared meal, films, sport, prizes and performances built around the theme of communal harmony, over a few days each year.

Data, communication and Aadhaar. The mission would also provide local support for basic data and communication, particularly in remote and underdeveloped regions where marginalised groups suffer most in accessing schemes and services. Community access points at block level could deliver services relating to schemes, banking and other necessities close to where people live. Linking mobile connectivity with Aadhaar could speed administrative assistance, including the delivery of cash benefits, the fast-tracking of complaints and the reporting of hate crimes. This direction is consistent with how flagship welfare schemes are already moving: the revamped Post-Matric Scholarship for Scheduled Caste students, for instance, now channels central assistance to beneficiaries through Aadhaar-seeded bank accounts, which reduces leakage and delay. Extending that plumbing to grievance redress and social-harmony reporting would improve the speed and reach of schemes that are currently slowed by administrative bottlenecks and captured intermediaries, and would help address the rise in hate crimes against the most vulnerable, especially in rural India.

A forecast

If these reforms and initiatives are adopted, it is reasonable to expect that rates of hate crime against marginalised groups will fall as surveillance and monitoring of the problem improve and as local bodies are made accountable for it.

Where the administration involves itself directly in community development, there is a real prospect of improvement at the rural level, because responsibility and accountability are pushed down to local governance where the harms occur.

The social-harmony reports and index would in turn yield rich detail on problems that are otherwise hidden in social life, and the changes to reservation would blunt the emerging challenges that arise from social mobilisation and political propaganda alike. The 2024 Supreme Court endorsement of data-driven sub-classification suggests that the legal ground for these changes is now firmer than when this argument was first framed.

Conclusion

Reservation in India has fallen short because its operation drifted away from the goal of lifting the socially oppressed, and so the problem persists on the ground. What is needed is a different narrative and a clearer objective for dealing with caste and class oppression, one that lifts marginalised groups socially and, where necessary, economically, in a fair and reasoned way. The tools for this are no longer only aspirational: a caste enumeration has been shown to be feasible, the Supreme Court has cleared the path for empirically grounded sub-classification and a creamy-layer test within the Scheduled Castes, and the delivery infrastructure for targeted benefits already exists. If progressive measures of the kind set out here are taken, and grounded in reliable data rather than electoral calculation, they would contribute more to the country's social development and communal harmony than almost anything else.

Sources

1. State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024), seven-judge Supreme Court bench on sub-classification within the Scheduled Castes and the creamy layer.
2. LiveLaw analysis of State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh: sub-classification, the empirical-data requirement and the creamy-layer debate.
3. 2022 Bihar Caste-Based Survey, results released 2 October 2023, with category-wise population shares.
4. Business Standard report on the Bihar caste survey findings.
5. Drishti IAS summary of the NCRB Crime in India 2022 report on crimes against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
6. The News Minute report on NCRB 2022 figures: 57,582 cases against Scheduled Castes and 10,064 against Scheduled Tribes.
7. Janhit Abhiyan v. Union of India (2022) upholding the 103rd Amendment and the 10 per cent Economically Weaker Sections quota.
8. Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992): the Mandal judgment, the 50 per cent ceiling and the creamy-layer doctrine.
9. Department of Social Justice and Empowerment, Post-Matric Scholarship Scheme for Scheduled Caste students.