That brahmin girl may also go onto become the Defense Minister of India and then the finance minister because she is the right caste.
Meanwhile, the poor Dalit surgeon will be ostracized at his work and gets harassed by casteist everyday and is so depressed that he can't sleep and thinks about suicide all the time.
Nepotism tastes like butter but Affirmative action tastes bitter. This is the definition of hypocrisy.
Is it possible for someone with a 50% GPA to finish a cardiac surgery training program in India? Or is that a gross exaggeration?
In the US, someone with a 1300 SAT has a good chance to graduate from T20 school, but someone with a 50% GPA is unlikely to be admitted to any medical school, and if they are admitted, they have roughly 0% chance of getting accepted to / completing a cardiac surgery residency, which is incredibly demanding.
If you don't know any highly skilled people from disadvantaged backgrounds that benefited from some affirmative action, that says more about you and your environment than the policy. There are definitely problems where affirmative action gets exploited, but it is horribly reductionist to find the entire tool useless because of that.
I've heard some pretty horrible stories about this in particular; like Brahmin kids being legally adopted into Sudra families in order to get into a reserved position at a State University, and rich kids with private tutors getting given further advantage over poor kids doing all the work themselves because they happen to be of a lower caste.
Just like in every other country, affirmative action does nothing but help members of a specific group who are already advantaged.