smr’s blog

1918-1919 : Reservations in government jobs were introduced in 1918 in Mysore in favor of a number of castes and communities that had little share in the administration. In another instance, upon petition from the Muslim community, the British government at the time made provisions in the Government of India acts of 1909 and 1919 granting Muslims share in the administration and other facilities.

1931 : Ambedkar pressed for a separate electorate for the depressed classes at Round Table Conference in London held from November 1930 to January 1931 while representing the depressed classes there.

1932 : Ambedkar and Gandhiji signed the Poona Pact. According to the pact the separate electorate demand was replaced with special concessions like reserved seats in the regional legislative assemblies and Central Council of States.

1935 : In the communal award of 1935, legislative seats were reserved for members of the Muslim, Sikh, Maratha, Parsi, Christian, European, and Anglo-Indian communities. In addition seats were reserved for depressed classes within the Hindu community.

1942 : The scheduled castes were given 8.5 reservation in central services and other facilities in 1942.

1947 : In independent India, provision for reservation in legislature was made in the constitution until 1960, recently extended until 2010. Provision for public services was made at the same time with no time limit.

1950 : In constitution of India, 15% of educational and civil service seats were reserved for “scheduled castes” and 7.5% for “scheduled tribes.”

1963 : The Supreme Court of India ruled that total reservations could not exceed 50%.

1980 : Mandal Comission recommended changes to quotas, increasing them by 27% to 49.5%. (limited by 1963 act). The commission estimated that 52% of the total population (excluding SCs and STs), belonging to 3,743 different castes and communities was ‘backward’.

1990 : The implementation of the Mandal commissions’ recommendations in the case of government jobs by VP Singh. Despite widespread agitation (mostly among students), reservation for the backward classes were upheld to the extent of 27 per cent (this was in addition to the 22.5% already reserved for scheduled castes and tribes, bringing the total of ‘open’ seats to only 50.5%). Rajiv Goswami, student of Delhi University, self-immolated himself in protest of the government’s actions.

1992 : Panchayati Raj Act, 1992 (73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment) came into effect granting not less then 33% reservation to women in the Panchayati Raj Institutions or local bodies.

1993 : upheld 27% reservation for OBCs subject to the exclusion of socially-advanced persons/sections (creamy layer) from amongst the OBCs. Children of persons with annual income greater than Rs 1 lakh were also to be excluded. The limit was later revised to Rs 2.5 lakh in 2004.

1996 : Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda made the actual promise for reservation of seats for women in Parliament and State Assemblies.

2005 (Aug) : The Supreme Court abolished all caste-based reservations in unaided private colleges.

2005 (Dec 21) : After Arjun Singh’s move the Lok Sabha passed the 104th Constitution Amendment Act 2005, rolling back the SC judgment by introducing a new clause into Article 15 to allow for reservations for schedule castes and scheduled tribes as well as other backward classes in private unaided educational institutions other than minority institutions.

2006 (Apr-May) : Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh declared government’s intention to fix a quota for the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) in the premier government educational institutions like the Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs) and Indian Institute of Managements and other institutions of higher learning. Widespread protests are taking place.

* Under construction. Pls send me the missing dates, if you know any.

Links -
Who are the OBCs
Why Reservation For OBC Is A Must
Ghosts of Mandal haunt again
Affirmative Action
Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar

Nothing irritates me more then inefficiency. And Reservations hosts inefficiency.

Reservation is harmful
Less capable candidate get an opportunity which if given to best candidate would have increased productivity of the system. The harm is double actually. First the less capable candidate is working at less efficiency, and second a better candidate is forced to work at another (bad) place where he cannot work at full efficiency.

Its time to end the reservation, not increase it
If reservations hasnt done any good in 55 years, then we should now understand that it doesnt actually help anyone. Increasing reservation can not be the solution. We need to think about alternate methods if we actually want to help anyone.

SC/ST/OBC is not the right criteria for choosing the needy
SC/ST/OBC doesnt exactly define the need of such a privilege. Its so obvious.

How many generations need reservations
After someone has got benefits from reservation why should his kids get it ? They would be at much better of than many general category kids. Identifying creamy layers doesnt work.

A cast can not be generalized by a few people
All people in general (aka non SC/ST/OBC) category are treated equally. There are needy people in general category also. The effect of reservations on them is manyfold.

Minority is not as objective as it sounds
If two minorities work together, the majority might become the minority. With only 25% of population falling in general category facing the reservation chaos, i doubt the definition of minority.

Reservation benefits only a few SC/ST/OBCs
Reservation benifits only a few already better SC/ST/OBCs who are able to give proper education to their kids. The people who are considered while making the laws are not fortunate enough to get benefits of reservation as they are not able to give quality education to their kids to compete with elite SC/ST/OBCs. The reservation is going to people who should face open competition.

SC/ST/OBC know that they don’t have any competition
Years of reservation system, and examples from society have made it clear to these privileged people that there is not big competition to them. So their expectations from themselves and their kids have decreased. This has harmed these groups more than it can benefit. The nation should try to stop building of such feelings in 75% of its population.

Long Term Effects
Had the deserved people worked for these 55 years in the country, the country would have been far more better than what it is, and that would had benefited all O/BCs equally, alongwith the nation.

Though most of my points talks about the problem with the reservation policy, I in no way want any modifications in the reservation policies to answer these problems. My call is for No Reservation. Alternate method to help the needy, like to give them free education should be adopted. Help them prepare for the competition but don’t kill the competition.

Its good that country has come together on the issue, and is strongly protesting against. But i don’t see any step back from what is already said. Why didnt Ambedkar ask for separate nation for god’s people. Kaash!

Pls don’t make me hate my nation.

I protest
I Sunil Mohan Ranta, hereby declare that i will not participate in any form of govt elections in India until reservation is completely abolished or a party comes up with strong agenda to do so.

Update : Jayachandra has digged Nehru’s stand on reservation. Its in perfect sync with my views. Salute you Mr Nehru.

Features -
1. A split interface with text paragraph shown in upper view, and a typing interface in lower view.
2. The current line the user is typing is highlighted with different color.
3. Any error made in typing is highlighted with another color.
4. Can save the current typing session and load it again.
5. Can specify the source text as a file.
6. And all of this in real editor like environment.

If these features are good enough to call something a typing tutor.. then i am talking about something that was there all along and we didnt realize. The vimdiff ( aka vim -d ).

Steps :
- get a input/source text. say its in file input.txt
- start vimdiff with following command
vimdiff -o input.txt /tmp/temp.txt \
“+exe 2 \”wincmd w\”" “+normal 1000i ” \
“+diffupdate” “+go 1″ “+startinsert”

( Don’t worry about the long argument list. They are used to customize the starting point. Otherwise just the command vimdiff input.txt /tmp/temp.txt is enough.)

A few other setting might make it a better experiance -
- :set wrap
- :set diffopt=filler,iwhite,icase
— iwhite for ignoring amount of white spaces
— icase for ignoring case senstivity
- :set scrollbind
- omit the -o option for vertical split
- :diffupdate to sync the two windows forcefully

enjoy vimtt !!

Related : Advanced Vim Tutorial

tried Ruby on Rails. and i am now in love with it. you can call it infatuation as well, coz its my third day only with RoR. but i didnt do anything except RoR in these 3 days.

Its been lots of time since its release, and everyone everywhere was talking about it. but i didnt read much on it and assumed that its another framework for web development like those in java etc. but it actually is something worth the hype, even more.

Rails makes web development so easy and beautiful. the code written in RoR has a beauty. i loved to go through my code again and again. restructure it to make it even more better.

The Rails framework is backed up by equally strong language Ruby. A very intuitive language with features of perl and python. probably what Matz (Ruby developer) wanted it to be. His reason for developing this language is interesting - a human focused language. Being a efficiency aware programmer i dont appreciate that much, but i understand exactly what he means.

Rails definitely is the silver bullet for web development. What say Mr Brooks.?

As an example, i tried implementing mess portal on RoR. About 2 years back we implemented it using php. it took me and nir 3 days. But using RoR i was able to implement it in less than 2 days. It was my first encounter with php and Ruby respectively, both seemed intuitive to me. during earlier implementation we didnt know exactly what to make, and this time i knew it clearly, so that helped. php (or perl) is definitely a nice language, but when we talk about db backed application (which mostly is), RoR is the answer. The biggest difference in these two implementation is the code structure. I feared to look at the php code for the second time. it was such a mess, written in ad-hoc way. RoR doesnt allow one to mess up things. It forces to use MVC and DRY. The more i am thinking about it, the more i am falling in love with it.

Temporary Mesg : Interested [local] people can have a look at Mess on Rails[login=guest/pass=iiit123]. Its not fully up, but core logic is in place. If you want to contribute to it you are welcome. I will send u the code.

PS: It might be interesting to go try newly released cakePhp, a php alternatice to Rails. Afterall php was my favourite web development language.