The road to a medical education in India is anything but smooth. One is not talking about the actual years of study and residency, but of making it to the portals of a decently equipped and staffed college. The competition is fierce. The National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test draws 16 lakh candidates for 88,000 MBBS seats, the preparation starts years ahead robbing the aspirants of the joys of childhood, coaching factories such as the ones in Kota proliferate, tensions mount, deaths by suicide increase, heartbreaks exceed exultation. And then there is the overarching shadow of reservations, the undoubted major premise in the prospectus. Starting with the advent of the Constitution in 1950 for a 10-year period, reservations have continued uninterrupted at an ever-increasing pace owing to a combustion of unrealised aspirations, increasing awareness of historical wrongs, political expediency and vote banks. As much as we have wanted to move away from a caste-based society, we have become even more wired into one where caste predominantly dictates reservation, and reservation determines accessibility to education and employment.
Courts and quotas
The courts have struggled to balance the competing demands of preference and unrestricted competition cast as merit. Initially the judiciary’s bent towards equality made it view reservations and quotas through a less-than-welcoming lens. Later on, it recognised that substantive equality does mandate a catch-up philosophy to bring the less fortunate up to levels where competition can be had on more equal terms. Courts have moved up the percentage scale of what they considered permissible, and come around to the halfway mark of 50%, the common negotiating point of resolution. The Supreme Court used a simple explanation to justify this stoppage point: reservations are an exception to the rule of equality, an exception cannot exceed the norm, ergo stop at 50%. It seems to have held on to this principle enunciated in the Balram (1972), Indra Sawhney (1992) and Maratha reservation (2021) cases.
