At times we oppose ideologies just because we love to rebel.

So as a frustrated teenager, who was fighting to get a seat in a decent engineering college, I was furious at the govt who was keeping on piling quotas over quotas for almost every other community of India. Cant they fight in a fair competition, I thought. Then through Teach for India I entered the community and villages, saw children of Rag Pickers, vegetable vendors, and saw in front of my eyes the cruelties of the caste system. It gave me a new dimension to think about reservations. How can I expect them to fight in a fair competition when life has never been fair to them? So was I wrong then? No, 6 years earlier, though lacking experience and backed by an unclear rationale, I was arguing on the correct side of the problem. Statistically, More than 80 per cent of underprivileged students never make it past Class X; more than 80 per cent of the reserved seats in vocational institutes remain unused; and in engineering colleges its even worse more than 90 per cent of seats in the reserved category just lie empty. How is then reservation bringing development for the poor and the backwards if they cant even use it? The picture becomes even starker if we consider what percentages of people who use the reservation are living in a well furnished house in a major city. Reservation has been treated like a lollipop by the government. Whenever there is unrest in a community due to the lack of development and the unfulfilled promises of the election times, this lollipop of reservation is given to them. By giving reservation the government is hiding its inability to provide development to those areas. It means that the condition of primary education will remain as such and never ever will more than 80 percent people will have the educational strength to fight for their opportunities. Thus I oppose the current reservation system and demand a new system that puts more focus on te ones who need it. One step would be to construct quality schools throughout these regions and providing free basic education. Also providing full support to NGOs who are working towards their upliftment. And in case the quality of education is still not equal then maybe after doing a economic status sorting, reservations can be given to the ones who actually need it.