Assessing the Impact of Affirmation Action on Educational Attainment in India

Sonalde Desai, University of Maryland
Veena Kulkarni, University of Maryland

While Indian society remains highly stratified along caste and religious lines, India also represents an experiment in affirmative action that exceeds anything seen in developed countries. Compensatory or positive discrimination policies have been put in place to to reserve 15 percent of the seats in institutions of higher education and in government employment for people of the lowest castes, the ‘scheduled caste ’; 7.5 percent seats have been reserved or ‘scheduled tribes’. These policies have generated substantial backlash and on the ground sabotage of the programs. We examine changes in the educational attainment between various caste groups in the past 20 years to evaulate the success of these policies. We use data from large national sample surveys of over 120,000 households for each of the four survey years, 1983, 1987-88, 1993-94 and 1999-2000 and focus on the educational attainment of youths aged 15-22.