Brand IIT - Part-1: Reservation

During past two three years some key decisions were made by Ministry of Human Resource Development and IIT Council, which met with a lot of criticism by either general public and/or by IIT community, which includes present students, alumni and professors. Issue of extending reservation to OBC was met with protests from nearly whole of student community. Issue of increasing number of IITs and increasing seats per IIT was welcomed by a majority of “stressed out” parents whose child was preparing for IIT; however this issue was condemned by nearly whole IIT community.

Everybody has his own views on these topics. I had my own, most of them being purely sentimental, after all it relates to my own Alma matar. So I thought why not do a little research to check what do the facts say. Here is my analysis and do let me know what do you think.

Reservation
On the first look reserving additional 27% seats looks totally disastrous, of course even the concept of reservation is against meritocracy. But let’s look more closely, what are the factors that influence quality of students getting admission?
a) The competition faced and ultimately
b) The cutoff marks.
In order to do a comparison of “competitiveness” across categories I normalized their ranks, within category such that the ranking is mapped to a scale of 1 to 100. Using following formula:

Where,
Rn is normalized rank,
Rl is last rank in category
R is the original rank in category
So now I have something reverse of percentile, following graph shows these normalized ranks and the aggregate marks achieved by candidate in JEE-2008. (Data was provided on JEE2008 website)

Now from above graph you can clearly see curves for Open category and OBC category totally overlapping, whereas the curves for SC and ST overlap each other while lying significantly below the curves for Open and OBC categories.

Consider these hard facts:
A total of 384977 candidates appeared in JEE-2009 and out of them 10035 candidates have been declared qualified, giving out a selectivity of 2.6%. Out of 104045 OBC candidates who wrote JEE, 1930 have qualified. This is a selectivity of 1.85%.

For open category aggregate cutoff was determined to declare the required no. of candidates (1.15 times the number of seats available) qualified:
Aggregate cutoff - 172No. of candidates qualified – 7903

Relaxation given to reserved categories is as follows:
OBC & PD - 10% lower than the aggregate of the last qualified candidate in the common merit list.SC & ST - 40% lower than the aggregate total of the last qualified candidate.
For reserved categories cutoff is decided on following basis: Cutoff calculated using relaxed criterion or till the required number of candidates (1.15 times the number of seats available in the category, except for OBC) qualify, whichever is higher.

Following were the actual aggregate cutoffs based on above criteria:

Note that the cutoff for OBC category is same as that for open category and significantly higher than the relaxed cutoff ie. 154.8, however for other categories the cutoff is exactly as per the relaxations given (PD – 10% relaxed, 154.8; SC and ST – 40% relaxed, 103.2).

This implies following:
Competition among OBC category is high enough to avoid cutoff reaching the “relaxed” region. OBC reservation in reality is not needed and has no effect either. Ratio of OBC candidates to total number of candidates is in proportion with ratio of reserved seats and the total seats. It’s just a political card played by our politicians. Other Backward Castes are really not at all backward, they have access to same resources as available to upper caste candidates.

Another interesting conclusion that can be drawn is that the much controversial estimate of OBC population (27%) cannot be very inflated, at least the ratio of JEE candidates, which is mostly middle class, happen to lie in this range (104045 candidates out of total 384977 turn out to be 27.026%).

On similar lines we can draw conclusions on SC-ST categories. The competition is not high enough within SC, ST and PD candidates. The number of meritorious candidates is so less that lesser qualified candidates are getting into IIT with the help of relaxed cutoffs (which, 40%, IMHO is too relaxed).This again implies that either the estimate of their population is wrong or the population of these categories having access to proper resources is very low. Speaking in numbers, 36117 SC candidates appeared in JEE-2008 which constitutes 9.38% of total strength of candidates. For ST candidates figures are even more shocking, 12484 ST candidates translate to 3.24% only. I would say it has to be the latter case or a mix or both. Figures of 7.5% population of scheduled tribes and 15% population of scheduled castes can be a little, but not much, on the higher side. But one thing is certain; a majority of students from these categories are not even appearing for exam, which in turn implies that they don’t have proper resources to get qualifications needed for appearing in IIT-JEE, i.e. education till 10+2.

Indian government has failed terribly to provide these children with the basic schooling and until this is done forcing reservation in higher education is not going to serve any purpose.