Vertical towers of prosperity or the horizontal spread of reservation benefits?

Something on caste based job reservation. The issue is politically so sensitive that just an off-hand remark by RSS chief was enough to decimate BJP's hopes in the last Bihar assembly elections. So nobody dares to touch the issue at the practical level.

The so called ‘lower castes’ have been systemically exploited for the last 5000 years in India. There is no doubt that they need institutional support to bring them into the mainstream. Not that the government cannot give them positive incentives in other regard. Reservation in itself is not the end. It is just one of the means to the end. However, in the present system of reservation there are flaws that need to be corrected if the real cause of Dalit upliftment is to be achieved.

I have seen three generations of elite Dalit families reaping reservation benefits to rise on the socio-economic ladder. Like someone’s father is a class one officer in railways. He raises his family comfortably ib Delhi, provides best education to his children. His son, born, brought up and educated in Delhi, becomes a police officer. The police officer’s children born, brought up and educated in the best set up get reservation benefits to get governmental jobs. On the other hand, I am surrounded by poor educated Dalit young people in the countryside who haven't benefited from reservation in any way. They have the qualifications, but in the fight within the reserved category they are easily beaten by the elite Dalit families. So does it really serve the purpose. The cause is served if the reservation benefits spread horizontally across the social strata instead of creating vertical towers of prosperity in the same families where the reservation benefits pile up across generations.

The solution can be: Let reservation be a first generation benefit only, i.e., the children of a reservation beneficiary will not be eligible for the scheme anymore. When a Dalit gets a job on reservation, he/she is supposed to bring up his children in a way that they can compete against the best. It will help in spreading the reservation benefits horizontally to the other poorer Dalit families rather than the vertical compilation of benefits in the already rich Dalit families. Unfortunately it has been the trend so far. Job reservation is supposed to provide more and more people with basic amenities of life rather than some particular families reaping the benefits on account of the already existing benefits.