Ambedkar on Merit and Efficiency

In 1927, the Simon commission was set up which was attended by Ambedkar where he argued that the government jobs ought to be reserved for backward class communities.

In his report, he wrote that it was ‘notorious that the public services of the country’ were ‘a close preserve for the Brahmins and allied castes’.

Those who opposed reservations in public services contended that they would harm efficiency.

Ambedkar provided several reasons why efficiency would not suffer if seats in government jobs were reserved.

1) Ambedkar suggested that ‘educational merit’ could not be the only test to guarantee efficiency. He wrote that if educational facilities were freely and equally accessible to all communities, then reservations would not be required. However, since it was not so, telling backward classes to get jobs only through competitive exams was like practicing delusion upon them

2) Ambedkar wrote that “ welfare of large classes of people” could not be left in the hands of administrators drawn from a community that was ‘opposed to the rest of the population in its motives and interest ;. He wrote that government officers from particular castes could ‘’ easily prostitute their offices to the aggrandizement of their community and to the detriment of the general public”

3) Ambedkar also argued that an efficient government was not necessarily a good government. Ambedkar wrote that the disadvantages that were being faced by backward classes far outweighed the efficiency of government departments in previous years. In other words, it was better to have an inefficient but just government, rather than an efficient unjust one.

He therefore suggested that vacancies should be reserved for depressed classes, muslims and non brahmins ensuring a proper admixture of the different communities in the public service

( Source: These seats are reserved book by Abhinav Chandrachud)