I was curious about how the Indians handle this, too, so I read Republic of Caste by Anand Teltumbde. It's a long, rambling, but detailed description of how the reservation system was playing out in India. Broadly, he argues that any initial positive effect has been displaced by caste becoming even more of a wedge issue (each caste feeling disadvantaged unfairly and hyper-vigilant for others' corruption) and castes scrambling for favorable designations (e.g. inventing a new history of victimization or fabricating a genealogy in order to be assigned to a more favorable schedule).

Ironically, Teltumbde advocates for replacing reservations with American-style affirmative action.

Now it is a competition among castes to show that they are the most backward, since they would be considered for reservations then.

and this makes sense as well, I think while in practice the affirmative action in India seems ideal it is far too idealistic and one dimensional. Like just doing it on the basis of race would be in US.

Should an Asian kid coming from a family with financial difficulties be subjected to the same bias as others.

Also, I read a weird thing that in India even religions that don't have a caste system, have castes. It is interesting that Christians, Muslims can have one. It seems like that's one way to reap the benefits of the system.

It is simply a bad mechanism and argument to put injustices of the past on the shoulders of new generations, especially with goals defined in such a blurry manner. On the contrary, the best remedy is to treat people as equals.

That isn't unpractical realism, nothing else is required. Of course some will have a huge head start and culture towards education is a very important factor. But you can shelve the false justice which is just racism with another motivation.

> It is simply a bad mechanism and argument to put injustices of the past on the shoulders of new generations

There's no argument to be had; injustices of the past do land on the shoulders of the present generation. Everyone is born into circumstances they did not create.

There is a reason "The sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons" is a saying.

Now, given that reality, the question becomes "What does a society do about it?" When people believe in equality of opportunity but can see that opportunity is heavily influenced by birth circumstance, how does one address that fact?

The injustices of the present need to be solved still. In America the way schools are funded in many states is such an obvious shorthand for racist school funding there isn't a level playing field.

I would suggest it's more along poverty lines than race lines. If you fix (well improve) the poverty rates it helps all races across the board. I think our emphasis is completely off base, education outcomes track with poverty a lot better than race.

I am fully on point with having more funding in education, it will always be a good investment and doesn't need racial discrimination.

This isn't true. Underfunding is not the issue with underperforming schools in the US. If you want to improve outcomes in inner city schools you need to fix the broken local culture first, but it's sort of chicken and egg.

http://thinkaboutnow.com/2016/03/debunking-the-underfunded-p...

https://www.vox.com/22266219/biden-eduation-school-funding-s....

Compare the homepages of the two. I know which one I trust more.

http://thinkaboutnow.com/

https://www.vox.com/

That was the first link that came up on ddg, but it's laughable to presume that vox isn't just as biased, just in the other direction. Here's a couple more on the subject. I suspect you won't find a left leaning source with this opinion because it would undermine one of the primary ideals behind modern progressive thinking, that all groups of people would magically achieve equity and equal representation across all domains if only presented with the same opportunities.

https://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/

https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-di...

Wow, thinkaboutnow is quite the website.

Sorry. It is true. I went to schools that could only afford a four day week. Couldn’t even afford the fifth day. This is still happening.

School funding is still an issue.

> to get admission in the top college

Could this indicate that there're many bright people in India, who are mostly self taught, because they belonged to the "wrong" group and so couldn't study at University (or at least not the one they wanted) ?

Whilst, if someone has studied at a top university, it doesn't mean that much?

This is correct to some extant, and not just for getting education. As an example, in many competitive exams conducted by universities etc. to select students, the selection cutoff marks clearly show this pattern of intentional discriminatory admittance.

For someone belonging to "general" category, anyone designated to an upper caste, the cutoffs percentage for selection could be as high as 97-99%. For "reserved" category candidates, those from the lower castes, the cutoff can be as low as 10-20% for the same test. This means someone scoring 95% would not get get an admission offer while someone else scoring 15% would.

This reservation system is also a part of government jobs. I have seen "reserved" teaching positions being filled by candidates who score negative marks in the selection exams. But since no other type of candidate can fill the reserved position, the highest negative score gets the job.

Does this really alleviate the issues borne out of historical oppression of the lower cast, I don't know. Perhaps. Is this overall a good thing for a nation and its people? Again, I have no idea.

> This means someone scoring 95% would not get get an admission offer while someone else scoring 15% would.

Sounds entirely made up. All these exams generally have a minimum clearing criteria at 60-65%

I mean the data is one google search away (granted, if you know some of the official caste related terms)

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/educa...

Also, the example I have provided are from 15 years ago, when I appeared for these exams. I'm not going to bother finding verifiable information from back then but the figures I mentioned are pretty much what I saw.

Then this is probably news to you. Search for Minimum eligibility on these

https://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=147623

https://indiankanoon.org/doc/93076753/

You and I are referring to completely different scores. It is true that a candidate needs to have scored a minimum percentage of around 50-60% in their high-school/intermediate board exams (so 10th/12th standard) to be allowed to sit in the selection examination.

The cutoffs I'm talking about are dependent on overall performance of all candidates. In the link I have shared this cutoff is 18% (89/480) for reserved category students. There are more details in the article about the cutoff for reserved category students being 60% of that of general category ones. There is further elaboration on how many students have to drop off because of their poor performance. These vacant seats are rarely filled.

You can read the document again. It's the minimum eligibility in the test they're taking not their high school scores.

> the cutoff for reserved category students being 60% of that of general category ones

It is not that off and even if it were, it's not as bad as you initially claimed: 18%. AND media houses are known to sensationalize everything.

In the article the figures of 18% vs 36% are mentioned rather than 15% vs 97%.

Right, it is. Like I said, the figures I've pulled are from what I remember from 15 years back. Unfortunately I'm not able to find any sources with light searhcing.

I'd like to point out that there is a high possibility that there is an upward trend in reservation category cutoffs. And if it is indeed the case then I'd be the happiest.

As for my other claim, please see [1] and [2].

1. https://www.theyouth.in/2018/06/16/candidate-who-scored-minu...

2. https://www.india.com/education/zero-cut-off-maths-phd-inter...

Thanks! I hope they won't start using these ways of hiring people, to find airplane pilots. Negative marks in the exams

AA and other background-accounting factors have some place as an input into the system. You simply can't possibly claim that poor white rural kids in the south or black urban kids in poor neighborhoods (and all similar such situations) have the same chances at success of getting into harvard/yale/MIT as a rich white/asian kid from NYC who went to the best public/private schools (and SAT tutors) money could afford. There has to be some balance in there to account for such things. Until people put something forth as viable AA and quotas are what we have.

"Rich white/asian kid from NYC"

I've seen this sort of characterization a lot here. I can understand it, but it doesn't really reflect reality. I don't know a lot about other areas, but in NYC, most asians are not "wealthy". Far from it, Asians in NYC have a substantially lower median income ($53k household, $25k per capita) than whites ($69k household, $50k per capita ).

More importantly, the asian kids being discriminated against are not from wealthy families. Those that come from well off families tend to have all the extra-curriculars that white kids from wealthier families do. It's the ones from poor families. The ones who have to work after school and weekends to help out... and still study hard. Their parents cannot afford music/dance/arts lessons. The kid can't spend hours a day volunteering. Etc. It's these kids who get shafted when universities seek "well rounded".

Many of the lower income asian kids are from recent immigrant families. Their parents who barely speak english, working low paying jobs. They sacrifice everything to try to give their kids a chance to get ahead. And push their kids crazy hard to do well in school as they see it as their only way up. Imagine the feeling when -- after years of sacrifice and hard work -- after your kid did great in school, got great SAT scores, did everything he's supposed to do... he still gets denied by every good school..

> Those that come from well off families tend to have all the extra-curriculars that white kids from wealthier families do. It's the ones from poor families.

Or even just middle class families. I send my kids to private school with family money WASPs where we have a second winter break in February for ski trips. My kids will know how to navigate a system that puts more emphasis on writing an essay about how her grandfather grew up in a Bangladeshi village than on her SAT scores. But when my parents and I were recent immigrants to the country I certainly didn’t have that kind of cultural capital.

And it’s not just an immigrant thing. My (American) wife was noting that her dad, who grew up objectively poor would never have suggested he suffered adversity growing up, because after all they lived in a “stick built house” (a framed house as opposed to a mobile home).

See "rich" as in not poor. You can't shutdown the primary reasoning of my argument and downshift it to your point. My main point was poverty and location, I really don't even give a fuck about your race. The biggest problem in this country is delineated by who has money and who doesn't. That is the 90% problem, not race.

If your main point was poverty and location, adding race to the description certainly doesn’t help especially with the poor minority vs rich white/Asian angle.

> However, in case of South Asia/India, the argument is positive discrimination now to correct for negative discrimination in the past.

I don't think India makes this "penance for primordial sins" argument.

There's a current high correlation between somebody's caste and somebody's socio-economic status which is reservation is supposed to solve. It has loopholes surely and in some parts of the country, completely useless. But overall it is effective in increasing social mobility and social cohesion.

The argument isn't against Asians, it's in favor of other groups.

I understand. But my argument was, it seems unfair that these Asian kids whose ancestors didn't have anything to do with the race discrimination in US, have to be on the receiving end of the affirmative action.

I know it is not a good example but should we have affirmative action in sporting teams as Asians seem to be underrepresented there.

Should we rather improve the funnels before which are leading to this concentration of Asian kids. This is not even considering the fact if even the desire to follow some subject is equal in every race. If it is not and it should be all things being equal at the start, then we should fix the funnels before.

We're talking about policies that favor some groups against others in a competition for scarce resources (college places, scholarships), so it clearly is going to have a negative effect on the people that are not in the favored groups. And even if the policies weren't so openly discriminatory (eg. SAT scores, quotas), the disparate impact on Asian-Americans would still be obvious.

"scarce resources"

I wish the effort was put into making them less scarce. It's one of the very specific illnesses of American economic culture that we are willing to bite and claw each other over access to things that need not be rare.

There's no shortage of great community colleges, though; the problem is that elite institutions in particular are being made artificially scarce for certain groups of people (Asian-Americans in this case) by government fiat, as well as the fact that prestigious institutions are valued because of their scarcity and exclusivity. If they managed to increase their admissions by a factor of ten, then the value of their degrees in the eyes of society would decrease because amongst other things this would mean that they would have to be less selective about who they accepted.

The number of admissions is limited. If there are two groups, X and Y, and you discriminate in favor of giving more admissions to group X, group Y will have fewer.

So it is ok to favor whites over Asians?