Dismantling the Legacy of Caste - Centre For Development Economics

A variety of initiatives are intended to improve access to secondary and higher education for
disadvantaged groups.
For instance, these initiatives include special residential schools, free
accommodation, scholarships, and concessions in tuition. The most important aspect of affirmative action
programs is the reservation of a certain percent of seats in institutions of higher education for students
from these social groups. The extent of this latter degree of affirmative action is substantial (though the
Supreme Court of India has ruled that in higher education total allotments to disadvantaged castes cannot
exceed 50%). The Indian state we are studying reserves the following percentage of seats in each college:
15 percent for SCs, 6 percent for STs, 7 percent each for BC-As and BC-Ds, 10 percent for BC-Bs, and 1
percent for BC-Cs. Moreover, one third of seats in each discipline is reserved for female students from
each social group.
At present there are only a few studies systematically evaluating the impact of affirmative action
in Indian higher education. Darity, Deshpande, and Weisskopf (2011) draw parallels between the Indian
and U.S. cases, and evaluate how various affirmative action programs might affect admission prospects
for potential beneficiaries in the two societies, but do not address the issue of mismatch. 11
Kirpal and
Gupta (1999) examine the performance of students from disadvantaged castes in the prestigious Indian
Institutes of Technology (IIT), and though their study also does not directly address the question of
mismatch, it is worthwhile to note their findings. They document that academic performance was indeed
lower for students in the disadvantaged SC/ST groups. Still, graduation rates for these students were
found to be over 80 percent, which suggests that these beneficiaries of reserved seats—and the institutions
that are admitting them—are achieving important successes. On the other hand, a recent study by Kochar
(2010), who analyses data from one elite college, shows that affirmative action increases the variance of
11 These authors also provide reference to earlier relevant literature. For a nice example of research that gives a
sense of challenges in the Indian educational system at the pre-college level, see Muralidhara and Sundararaman
(2011).
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