Affirmative
Action Policies and Higher Education in India
McCord Auditorium, Dallas Hall, Southern Methodist University
September 6, 2014
Quantifying
the Effect of Reservations for Low Castes on Educational Attainment
Guilhem Cassan, The University of Namur, Belgium
The reservation debate is very strong in India, in particular, when it comes to education.
However, there is very little evidence on the impact of the various affirmative action policies on the level of education
of its beneficiaries. In other words, we lack systematic knowledge on the efficacy of those policies. Recently, economists
have used statistical tools, which permit their evaluation at the national scale. This presentation will detail the results
of two studies assessing the role of affirmative action policies on the educational attainment of the Scheduled Castes and
of the Other Backward Classes.
Guilhem Cassan holds a PhD from the Paris School of Economics.
His research, which was awarded the price of the French Economic Association, focuses on the impact of identity based policies
in India. After having completed a post doctoral visit at the London School of Economics, he is now Associate Professor in
Economics at the University of Namur.
Caste Disparities, Discrimination and Affirmative Action:
Two Stories from Tamil Nadu and Gujarat
Ashwini Deshpande, Delhi School of Economics
Tamil Nadu, a relatively rich state, has witnessed a long history of anti-caste movements and the predominance of
non-Brahmin political parties for several decades. Gujarat boasts of a high rate of growth over the last two decades, under
the stewardship of an OBC chief minister, with a claim that the growth has been socially inclusive. This paper is an attempt
to compare whether, to what extent, these two histories have resulted in different outcomes for the marginalized communities,
specifically the Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs. Relying on macro-data from the National Sample Survey, the paper adopts a “difference-in-differences”
methodology to track changes in indicators such as wages, consumption, education, occupation and labour market discrimination
and so forth across successive birth cohorts to examine if the gaps across social groups are diminishing or widening in each
of the indicators. The implementation of affirmative action in the two states has also been very different, with TN having
a range of state-level quotas. The resultant picture is a mixed one, reminding us that there are no straightforward solutions
(such as high growth alone) to the vexed problem of caste discrimination; and a multi-pronged approach backed by strong political
is possibly the only way forward in order to weaken the stranglehold of caste inequalities.
Ashwini Deshpande is Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. Her Ph.D.
and early publications have been on the international debt crisis of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has been working on the
economics of discrimination and affirmative action issues, with a focus on caste and gender in India, as well as on aspects
of the Chinese economy: poverty, inequality, regional disparities and gender discrimination. She has published extensively
in leading scholarly journals. She is the author of Grammar of Caste:
economic discrimination in contemporary India, OUP,
2011 and Affirmative Action in India, OUP, Oxford India Short Introductions series, 2013; and has
edited several volumes. She received the EXIM Bank award for outstanding dissertation (now called the IEDRA Award) in
1994, and the 2007
V. K. R. V. Rao Award for Indian economists under 45.
Affirmative
Action in Higher Education in India:
Targeting, Catch Up, and Mismatch
Veronica Frisancho, Inter-American
Development Bank, Washington, D.C.
Using detailed data on the
2008 graduating class from an elite engineering institution in India we evaluate the impact of affirmative action policies
in higher education focusing on four issues: targeting, catch up, mismatch, and labor market discrimination. We find that
admission preferences effectively target minority students who are poorer than average displaced non-minority students. Moreover,
we find that minority students, especially those in more selective majors, fall behind their same-major peers in terms of
grades as they progress through college. We also identify evidence in favor of the mismatch hypothesis: once we control for
selection into majors, minority students in more selective majors end up earning less than they would have had if they had
chosen a less selective major. Finally, we find no evidence of wage discrimination against minority students but they are
more likely to get worse jobs even after controlling for selection.
Veronica Frisancho is
a research economist in the Research Department. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Pennsylvania State University in
2012, and she holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the Universidad del Pacifico in Lima, Peru.
Before pursuing her doctoral studies, Veronica worked at GRADE,
a prestigious think tank in Peru, for almost six years. She also has several years of teaching experience in Peru and in the
United States. She has taught Intermediate Macroeconomic Analysis and Introductory and Intermediate Microeconomics, as well
as Growth and Development and Advanced International Trade Theory and Policy.
Veronica’s
work can best be described as applied microeconomics, and her main fields of specialization are Development and Labor Economics.
Her research in these areas includes an emphasis on education, labor markets in developing countries, and microfinance. She
is currently working on a series of articles on microfinance, savings, gender biased violence, vocational training, and on
academic performance and learning. She has published in the Population Research and Policy Review, India Policy Forum, and
in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, and currently has several articles under review.
Veronica is an active member of
the Royal Economics Society. She has been a referee for the Journal of International Economics, Journal of Labor Economics,
and The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy.
The Meritocrats: the Indian Institutes of Technology and the
Social Life of Caste
Ajantha
Subramanian, Harvard University
In India today, the technical sciences are
prized as the true measure of intellectual worth and a proven means of professional advancement. The technical graduate has
become India’s greatest export, widely understood to exemplify the country’s comparative advantage in the global
marketplace. The value and mobility of Indian technical knowledge are most graphically represented by the success story of
the Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs. Within Indian and American public discourse, the IITian has become an exemplar
of intellectual merit, someone seen as naturally gifted in the technical sciences. What gets obscured in such assessments
are the forms of accumulated social and cultural capital that have enabled admission to the IITs. What does the naturalization
of the IITian’s merit and the elevation of the IITs to emblems of meritocracy mean for the possibilities and limits
of democratic transformation in India? My paper shows that the politics of merit at the IITs illuminates the social life of
caste in contemporary India. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the forms of capital and Satish Deshpande’s
on the social life of caste, I argue that the IITian’s status depends on the transformation of caste privilege into
modern merit. However, I call for a more relational approach to merit by situating it in the context of subaltern political
assertion. Analyzing meritocracy in relation to subaltern politics allows us to see the contextual specificity of claims to
merit: at one moment, they may be articulated through the disavowal of caste, at another, through caste affiliation. Far from
the progressive erasure of ascribed identities in favor of putatively universal ones, what we are witnessing today is the
rearticulation of caste as an explicit basis for merit. Moreover, this rearticulation is not simply the assertion of an already
constituted caste identity. Rather, claims to merit generate newly consolidated forms of upper casteness.
Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests
include political economy, political ecology, colonialism and postcoloniality, space, citizenship, South Asia, and the South
Asian diaspora. Her first book Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India, chronicles the struggles for resource rights by Catholic fishers on India’s southwestern coast, with a focus
on how they have used spatial imaginaries and practices to constitute themselves as political subjects. Her current research
is on the relationship between meritocracy and democracy in India that considers the production of merit as a form of caste
property and its implications for democratic transformation.