Reasoned reservation

Historically, Higher Education, thus, has remained restrictive on the premise of a basic (natural) axiom of inequality in individual intellectual endowment and talent. That is, human beings of high intellectual calibre, ability and academic inclination are born naturally to be fewer in number and are also distributed randomly across an entire cohort of a population, irrespective of class, caste and creed

- ARUP MAHARATNA The writer is an independent Scholar and former Rajiv Gandhi Chair Professor in Contemporary Studies, Central University of Allahabad

There was a time - albeit not very long ago - when the term, higher education, (HE), meant chiefly teaching educational programmes at higher (post-secondary) levels in diverse disciplines and academic research conducted in educational institutions such as colleges and universities funded, in large part, by the state for promotion and cultivation of such precious public goods as scientific (original) inventions, new knowledge, new theoretical/analytical discovery and insights into major dimensions of human history, society, arts and culture. Unlike primary or secondary schools which impart universal basic education, the HE-arena was historically supposed to be thronged by those who happen to have not only proven intellectual superiority but also an innate thirst for deeper knowledge/truth and its persistent scholarly pursuits.

This is how the HE-system has been, for long, perhaps until the 1970s, a distinguished, sustainable and steady source of overall societal progression and flourish - scientifically, technologically, socially, politically and culturally. However, there has been an unpalatably skewed participation in HE by elite and socio-economically well-off sections of population - a fact which has reflected, for long, a social injustice rooted in the economic and political systems as a breeding-ground of perennial inequality in the distribution of income and wealth.