LET MERIT BE THE LAST WORD 

KAJAL CHATTERJEE

Reservation of seats for the senior citizens and specially-abled in Metro Railway coaches are often equated with caste-based reservation in higher education and job sector right from recruitment to successive promotion process! 

Senior citizenship and maximum cases of  physical challenges are nothing but irreversible phenomenon. Even nature or destiny is conspiring against them! So never never will it be possible for them to compete with the general population and grab the seat. Also it would be a Herculean job for them to remain standed on fast moving heavily crowded coaches.

So it is  nothing but demand of humanity to reserve seats for them. Specially because pursuance of such a policy will arrive as a manna from the heaven for the helpless beneficiaries, that too without causing hardly any harm to the rest of the population.

Now can these humanitarianism of  a little bit of  reservation for physically vulnerable section of population without discomforting others be equated with caste-based reservation in higher education and job sector with a shrewd clever eye on cheap electoral vote bank which not only rewards umpteen candidate way down the marks-centred merit list, but also deprive innumerable candidates scoring much better percentage from their entitled seats and jobs?

If only a token percentage of seats were allotted as reserved, still it could have been tolerable to a certain extent. But with each passing day percentage of reservation is being increased with the general "privileged" section getting more and more cornered. Also what an eyesore to notice how even many  candidates of economically prosperous families are bagging jobs despite faring worse than their better performing counterparts of poorer economic background. Why? Just because the former is affiliated to "non-privileged" reserved category, the latter being  “privileged" non-reserved! Is this justice? In the same vein the former will get promotions after promotions in official sector often rendering their much senior "privileged" non-reserved way behind in career scale! Is this justice? Also often it gets seen that the employees enjoying their quota are much inferior in performance efficiency and sincerity than the general category employees. Yet the former gets rewarded at the expense of the latter! Is this justice? Won't the traits of quality merit efficiency reduced to farce? Won't it affect the overall performance of the sector thereby dealing an adverse blow to the society!

In contrast to the natural degeneration of the senior citizens or physical constraints of the specially-abled; intellect or quality of the common Indian population cannot be graded in terms of caste. We are all the same, being children of the Almighty. Yet when reservation gets zealously demanded in the name of caste by its supporters, benefactors and politicians;  only two things can be concluded --- i)  they  hold absolutely no faith upon the competitive qualities of the "reserved" classes thereby demanding reservations for them and indirectly insulting their intellect  or ii) they are merely interested in discovering new castes or groups to bring it under the ambit of reservations only to provide its vote bank a further boost!

If this is another name of “social equality”, even the Almighty would not succeed in uniting the society in psychological terms, giving rise to more and more fragmentation.

Reserving seats for the "deprived" is as ridiculous as reserving berths in the Indian cricket team for players of Ranji teams like Uttarakhand or Arunachal Pradesh because they fail to make it to the national side! Not only would the performance of the team suffer, it would also mean gross injustice to the eligible players. Similarly national interests indeed get assaulted when ineligible personnel are allowed to don responsible posts at the expense of eligible ones. 

 Let education and books be provided free or at nominal rate to all economically poor people irrespective of caste so that all get established on an absolute equal platform and then let merit do the final talking through free and fair neutral competition.