Monday, July 10, 2006

Attn; All Anti Reservationists, YFE and LP. What will be your stand in this situation

A person called Sarveshkumar Iyer died in AIIMS cause the pro reservation activists stoped treatment abruptly and started a strike on the ouster of the minister Dr Anbumani Ramdass. Because of this 100 PILs are filed in SUPREME COURT and Mr Arun Jaitly is apearing for all those petitioners. He said one priceless Brahmin Soul passed away due to NEGLIGENCE of DUTIES by the STRIKING SELFISH MEDICOS. HE also condemed the DOCs for not giving any 24 hrs STRIKE CALL Notice and hence they should be sent home immdtly. Dr. venugopal Rao has also condemed the doctors and warned them severe consequences for destroying the image of AIIMS in the eyes of the general Public. The media from BBC to CNN have stationed their broadcasting wans to cover this landmark case on Human Equality in India. The Judge has reserved his ruling ...

Read the truestory at

Friday, July 07, 2006

Racism exposed in AIIMS Hostel

New Delhi, July 4: Parts of All India Institute of Medical Sciences hostels are turning into SC/ST ghettos. Reserved category students said they were being “hunted out of the remaining rooms” by upper-caste students and driven to two floors of the hostels.

An engraved message on the door of Room No. 49 (Hostel 1) bears testimony to their concern. The inscription, spiced with abusive language, asks the room’s occupant Umakant — a scheduled caste student — to “get out of this (hostel) wing”.

With almost half the reserved category students since seeking reallocation of their rooms, the message seems to have worked.

The top floors of Hostel No. 4 and 5 of the country’s premier medical school have 32 rooms in all, of which 27 are occupied by SC/ST students. Of the 250 students at the institute, 55 are SC/ST.

Hostel records show that 22 of the students currently in the “ghetto” moved there only in the wake of the surcharged atmosphere of the anti-reservation agitation that started with the human resource development ministry unveiling plans for a quota for the Other Backward Classes.

“Many more want to shift there but cannot because there aren’t enough rooms for everyone,” said a student.

AIIMS authorities said they would take “necessary action”.

Sub-dean Dr Sunil Chumber said he had himself faced discrimination during his college years. “My room was broken into, and things destroyed, because I came from a reserved category,” he said.

The SC/ST students said they were scared of the consequences of their identities becoming known for speaking out against discrimination.

A senior resident doctor, who belongs to the scheduled castes, said: “We are so scared here because the director (P. Venugopal) himself is supporting them (the anti-quota agitators). We have nowhere to go to complain.”

Resident Doctors’ Association president Dr Vinod Patro, however, said there was “no discrimination on the AIIMS campus”. “It is a figment of their imagination,” Patro, who has been leading the anti-reservation agitation at AIIMS, said.

Some SC/ST students alleged that to keep them from revealing the discrimination, they were often “failed in examinations”, which acted as a threat.

“Every year on an average five of the 11 reserved category students are held back,” a resident doctor said, citing his own case, where he was one of those failed in the first year.

AIIMS rules say a student who fails twice over the five years of study cannot pursue his or her post-graduation.

The students said that for fear of their careers being destroyed they did not want to “get into the bad books of the authorities”.

“The students have no choice but to bear this humiliation quietly and pass out in five years,” said Dr Vikas Bajpai of the Medicos’ Forum for Equal Opportunity, a pro-reservation group.

A meeting of the apex decision-making body of AIIMS is scheduled tomorrow in which the ouster of Venugopal could figure. Union health minister Anmbumani Ramadoss, who wants him to go, will come face to face with the director for the first time since the stand-off over the anti-quota agitation.

I STRONGLY ASK MR ANBUMANI RAMDOSS TO TEACH THESE RACISTS A LESSON OR TWO AND THE WHOLE OBC,SC,ST and HONEST FCs are with you AND you are our great HOPE. We must show our moral and political power to this idiots of socio economic reality of the country.

Most of these medicos are casteist Brahmins.... one who reserved everything from water to land to fire sorry agni to jobs to education to rapesex (manu smirthi), voyeurism (namboodiris of Kerala) for a few thousand years and got frustrated by recent events FIGHTING FOR EQUALITY, PATRIOTISM, INDIAN ECONOMY, SOCIAL UPLIFTMENT, WOMEN EMPOWERMENT etc. ( See the bold lists. non is their original. I used to say it is a parrot community who repeated few thousands slokas from an UNSPOKEN language called SANSKRIT. Now they shamelesly copy our Periyars and Ambedkar. Real 21st Century parrots! Ki ... ki... Parrot SOUND!)

- Chella, C.E.O, Tamilarmedia.com

Original Source: The Telegraph
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1) http://oomai.wordpress.com
2) Racist Medicos and their strike
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4)racism-in-university-college-of.html

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Issues of ‘Merit’ and Efficiency

An article by Jayathi Ghose

The most common argument against reservations is that they will affect quality and undermine “merit”. But the supposed contradiction between reservations on the one hand, and merit and efficiency on the other, is a false one. First of all, there are many reasons to believe that drawing upon a wider social base increases the diversity and, therefore, the quality of institutions of higher education. Secondly, there are good reasons to be sceptical regarding the extent to which current systems of selection are genuinely “merit” based. Internationally, there is substantial theoretical literature on the coexistence of markets and discrimination (whether in terms of caste, community or gender), and on how such discrimination reduces the efficiency of the economy – in which case affirmative action to reduce such discrimination can only increase efficiency.

It is well known that the Indian private sector employs wide-ranging discriminatory practices (such as inheritance determining managerial control, preferential employment based on social networks, and so on) which are inherently inefficient. It is now widely accepted across the world that diversity makes economies more, rather than less, competitive. The example of countries like Malaysia, which combined a very severe and restrictive form of reservation and other affirmative action with remarkable economic growth for several decades, points to this.

But how truly competitive is the current system of selection that operates for the elite higher education institutions in India? We are all agreed that there is huge excess demand for higher education in the country, and that good quality higher education is extremely under-provided. Therefore, there is severe rationing for places, especially in the best institutions. The question is therefore not whether we should have rationing or not, but, which form of rationing is the best in the prevailing social circumstances. It is currently believed that the current system is based on “merit”, that is, ranking of performance in all-India entrance examinations or such similar criteria. Yet any teacher or administrator at some of these top institutions (such as IITs or IIMs) will agree that there are typically several hundred candidates of equally good quality at the top, and they are able to admit only a small fraction of them, so that there is a large element of luck and randomness in the process of selection. For example, at the national entrance examination to the IITs every year, there are more than 3,00,000 entrants, yet only around 3,000 gain admittance to the various IITs. Yet it is quite likely that the top 20,000 are equally good if not better than those few who are fortunate enough to get selected, since performance at one single examination is rarely a complete indicator of actual aptitude or quality.

In any case it is also well known that these entrance tests typically test not intelligence or ability in the subject per se, but a certain aptitude for answering such tests. This is itself a skill that can be learnt, and there are now training institutes all over the country, especially in certain cities for this purpose. Such training in turn costs time and money, which effectively excludes most potential candidates. So the flourishing “coaching” industry for these competitive exams amounts to another form of exclusion, or “reservation” for those who can afford to spend enough time and resources to ensure this prior coaching. A further reservation effectively exists for those who can come in through “NRI quotas” which are now to be found in many institutions, or in institutions which require capitation fees or charge very large annual fees from students. This is a system of reservation of seats in higher education based on wealth, parental income or access to credit in the expectation of future incomes – all of which exclude the majority of the population. It is interesting that the sudden and apparent concern about merit has not touched on the implications of such admissions based on fees and whether students who get in through this means are “deserving” or not, although such processes have been going on for years. If we accept that intelligence and talent are not the monopoly of any particular social group but are normally distributed across society, then this means that the current system is inefficient since it is effectively picking up candidates from only a small section of society instead of the whole population.

It is elementary logic that this would give sub-optimal results for society. This is an argument on social efficiency grounds, which is quite separate from other arguments about creating a more democratic and inclusive education process in general. The most convincing empirical argument against the idea that reservations will inevitably lead to inferior quality comes from the actual experience in several southern states, where there have been large quotas on seats in higher education in operation for several decades. In Tamil Nadu, for example, reservations account for around two-thirds of such seats, even in private institutions, and in Karnataka they are close to half. Yet there is no evidence of inferior quality among the graduates of such institutions; instead, it is widely acknowledged that graduates from the medical and professional colleges in the south are among the best in India. Surely no one would contest that Vellore Medical College, for example, is one of the best medical colleges in India; yet, it has consistently operated with an extensive system of reservations accounting for more than half of the seats. It is notable that even in the north, elite “minority institutions” such as St Stephens’ College in Delhi University have functioned for decades by reserving around half the students’ seats for different categories, and still maintained their reputation of being among the best in the country.

Read the full version at
http://www.epw.org.in/articles/2006/06/10208.pdf

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