Wrong focus
August 4, 2010: The Indian Express
That India’s private sector is overwhelmingly dominated by upper castes is beyond dispute. Study after study has made this clear: in most surveys of urban professionals in information technology, the number of employees from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is too small to be expressed as a proportion, and some large surveys haven’t thrown up a single person from an SC/ ST background in the sample. Upper castes are massively over-represented, and the remainder are mostly OBCs. (Muslims, as is now well known, are under-represented too.) Some of this is, of course, due to inequality of opportunity: the greater social and physical capital that higher-caste people possess on average transfers itself into better educational outcomes, which affect their employability. But that isn’t all. One large-scale study of job applications in the private sector, by Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell, showed that “appropriately qualified applicants with a Dalit name had odds of a positive outcome that were two-thirds of the odds of an equivalently qualified applicant with a high caste Hindu name.¶ Discrimination exists, and it can’t be wished away.
But the state’s response to the fact of this inequality and this discrimination must be carefully measured. Several ministries in UPA-II have this summer determined that not enough is being done; and it appears that a job quota for SCs and STs in some sectors — that benefit from government incentives — is once again being seriously discussed; on Tuesday this newspaper reported that the commerce ministry has asked for views from major industry bodies. But is this the way forward? Legislating proportional representation as an end to discrimination is usually problematic, and can be self-defeating. And then again, anecdotal evidence suggests that even those companies that wish to have a more diverse workforce often do not have a diverse enough pool of qualified candidates to choose from. And any quotas will come into force in the organised sector alone, which is too small a fraction of the private sector to make enough of a difference.
Effective solutions will only emerge from a larger consideration of the complex of societal pushes and pulls, of merit and opportunity and prejudice, that lie at the source of this lopsided result. When true equality of opportunity arises in a free market, discrimination doesn’t pay; anyone who hires the people you turn down for reasons other than merit will wind up doing better than you. What policies, what intervention, will increase opportunity for all? Those that ensure that the targets of discrimination, whether people with SC, ST, or Muslim names — or women — have better access to quality education, to the wealth that funds job searches, to the credit that allows entrepreneurship.
