Lucknow University organised four days symposium on Neo-liberalism, consumerism and culture where Sonalde Desai, University of Marryland, USA, addressed the conference in Lucknow last week. She said in her analysis over the rising demand for reservation.
The past decade has seen rising demands for reservation from a variety of relatively prosperous agricultural communities; namely, Jats, Marathas, Patels, and Gujjars. These demands and underlying frustration have emerged in a decade when the economic narrative tends to focus on high rates of growth and declining poverty.
How
do we reconcile these two competing trends? Using data from the National Sample
Surveys between 1983 and 2012 we find in this paper which shows that, before
the adoption of neoliberal policies, Indian economy was dominated by large and
medium farmers who were both numerous and able to earn a reasonable standard of
living.
However, the past decades have faced a decline
in their economic power, which has turned once prosperous farmers into
subsistence farmers.
Simultaneously, there has been substantial
increase in the incomes of white collar salaried workers and professionals,
while job opportunities for white collar work has experienced only a modest
growth..
Data
from India Human Development Survey show that many agriculture base families
find almost all avenues of upward mobility blocked.
Successive
pay commissions have created a rising gap between the salaries of lower level
government workers and the workers in the private sector – the levels gap of both
side have made the preference of government job highly desirable.
However,
downsizing of government employment makes this an almost impossible dream.
Coveted modern occupations in private sector demand skills and credentials that
are beyond the reach of most rural students.
Although
educational attainment in rural India has grown, a vast proportion of rural
students are attending the institutions that fail to equip them for the modern
world.
Not surprisingly, these blocked mobility
aspirations come together into a demand for reservations in government jobs and
institutions of higher learning resulting in political mobilization of
agricultural communities.
