From quota madness to meritocracy

Quotas cannot be abolished without better alternatives, but where is the conversation about the latter?

We are having the wrong kind of conversations on inclusion and inequity, both in India and abroad. In the US, the Supreme Court just handed down a 6-3 verdict outlawing race-based affirmative action programmes in two educational institutions, Harvard and the University of North Carolina. But even as the courts are reversing decades of “progressive law-making”, politicians are trying to include caste as one more kind of discrimination. They are thus importing an Indian problem into the US, even as their judiciary is saying race cannot be the entire basis for affirmative action.

In India, we are going in the opposite