Thread by @lokeshbag67

The concept of Merit has become an important subject of discussion in recent years. It is at the heart of how we envision excellence in education and also of much of the debate on the issue of Reservation. Lets understand the concept of Merit and why we need to redefine it.

A students who tops a given exam is said to have merit and the others do not. The notion that the system rewards talent and hard work encourages the winners to consider their success their own doing or to the extent, a measure of their virtue & to look down upon others.

#merit

The opportunity to get such success or acquire such competency, however, is socially constructed. In this way our education system indirectly reproduce existing inequalities.

The fundamental problem is therefore to know why all are born equal, but become unequal later. In every class there are some students who always do better than others.
Why do only a few students get admitted to an IITs and IIMs each year? What is the reason behind this?

The popular answer is that only a few have merit, but it hides a lot with this simple answer. It is more complex than it seems.

Racists would say that differences in abilities of the students are due to the differences between races and the casteist would say that differences are due to differences between Castes. Minor biological differences may exist between different communities as well as

between men & women. However, biological advantages need supportive environments to get “turned on” & how well developed those advantages become. The environment seems to play a much larger role than biology.

Many qualities that are learnt by human beings as they grow up in a community and go through a variety of experiences. All are born with an approximately equal capacity to learn, but differences in social environments lead to that being converted into different kinds of abilities

Exams are set up to identify some few of those abilities. Merit, then, is not what it seems – it is not a quality possessed by an individual alone. It is also the product of what kind of community one comes from and of the history of that community.

The differences which have been created by history are of great importance. The individual effort is also important. But that effort, too, is being expressed through a historically created medium. There is a different starting point for different communities.

Our social environment influences merit. The most basic way is through economic and social inequality. Majority of Oppressed caste people still live in hazardous condition.

They have little access to economic resources and are routinely ignored by the media. Living in desperate circumstances, they have to struggle to come to school & continue their education. They fight against terrible odds to convert their talent and capacity into merit.

The ability to acquire merit is denied by the problem of getting physical access to schools. The simple fact of how far one has to walk to get to a school, bad condition of the roads & transportation system acts as a critical filter against several children of oppressed castes.

Again, many oppressed caste children face caste discrimination in their schools which lead to lesser focus on studies and even discontinuation of their education. Many never get the proper attention from the teachers and many find it hard to transition from

local language (dialect) to the state sponsored language. The state language of Odisha is Odia, but the state is full of different dialects of Odia and tribals have different sort of language altogether.

The elite previleged caste ( Upper caste) people are fluent in Odia, while the oppressed caste people are not that fluent in Odia which make them inferior.

Their dialects are considered inferior and don't get much attention in literary circle.
It becomes a major obstacle in the education of SCs and STs.

If they get into middle school that is not in the same village as the primary school, then there will be a decrease in the number of students and the most affected groups are the students from oppressed caste.

When a family look for probable future a child will have after finishing matriculation, then it often has to take difficult decisions. The first to lose out are girls because parents prefer to save money for their marriage in a society that values marriage over education.

For privileged caste children, it is a relay race in which they inherit a starting point from their parent. In this intergenerational relay race, child born into the privileged caste automatically start near to the finish line because of their social, cultural

and economic capital, while children born into poverty or children of oppressed caste start behind everyone else. Equivalent amount of merit may not lead to equivalent end results.

Privileged caste children enjoy better standard of living. They get better quality of food, sleep, clothing and shelter. They also get better tutor and parental assistance for their studies.

Due to cultural capital the Brahmin culture becomes the Indian culture and Brahmin religion becomes the Indian religion. Similarly, cultural capital include interpersonal styles & demeanor, manners & vocabulary that are specifically used by privileged or elite class people.

Those with backward backgrounds (Oppressed Castes) who aspire to become successful must acquire these to be accepted in elite circles, and this is no easy task. However, some ( Privileged caste) have the advantage of acquiring it automatically through inheritance.

There is another way privileged caste people restrict the flow of wealth and inheritance by selecting marriage partners from within their social circles of acquaintances ( mostly from same caste ).

The privileged caste can enforce endogamy to an extent of social ostracization and even honour killing if someone tries to defy the rules.

It is common knowledge that unemployment is high in oppressed caste youth or they often get forced to chose unregulated jobs with high manual labour (daily wagers) and directly hazardous to health ( Manual scavengers).

Jobs come to people through the mediation of parents and other adults in their immediate community. If such networks are weak because of the scarcity of adults employed in good jobs, teenagers have less social capital and receive less information about jobs.

Left with their own resources, adults from oppressed community are forced to get a job which is not par with their merit.

Sometime the most blatant form of advantage through social capital goes to the close kin or friends where open merit-based competition should prevail. We have seen this in Bollywood, in Indian Judiciary and in business sector. This is called nepotism.

While applying for jobs in private sector or for higher education in foreign countries, apart from the merit of the applicants, applicants whose references are well-known or prestigious have an advantage over applicants whose references are none of those things.

feminisminindia.com/2017/03/22/cas…

There were many protests by against reservations by Savarna students since the reservation came into existence. They hold the belief that Reservation is anti-merit.

The hold of ideologies is remarkable: they were willing to agitate against reservation, but not against the fact that there were so few seats in the first place! The first was to them clearly illegitimate. The second was probably seen as only “natural”.

Opinion of Justice D Y chandrachud ( who did his PhD thesis on affirmative action) and justice A S Boppana on Merit and Reservation

I have a question
"How much will be the difference in results with each repetition of a test? "
There is another basic problem with the merit argument, many of the rest were rejected not because they were unsuitable for the job.

They were rejected because the jobs were not enough for all of them. For example if you have 20 seats for a job and you have 1000 applicants, you will get more non-meritorious applicants while you will get lesser non-meritorious applicants if you increase the seats to 500 or 600.

According to the Department of Personnel and Training (DOPT) report, the representation of the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC) in public sector jobs was 1% in 1935.

A press release by the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions on July 17, 2019, reported that the representation of SCs and STs in public services under Central government is fulfilled at 17.49% and 8.47% respectively as on January 1, 2016.

However, in that representation, like in earlier years, the percentage of cleanliness workers contributes to a huge chunk; 45.16% of SCs and 6.9% of STs respectively. In Group A jobs, SC communities account for 13.38% and ST communities held 5.92%.

We need to adress the fact that merit is the product of talent of the individual and the social and economic standing of the community to which he/she belongs.

The challenge lies in creating a society where merit truly starts with equal opportunity and does not serve to legitimize systemic inequality and injustice.

Admitted to IITs and IIMs*