Is it only the creamy layer among the SC/ST who are benefiting from reservation?

Time and again, we hear that only the better-off among the SC and ST are benefiting, and the real benefits of reservations are actually not trickling down to

Now let us look at the total number of employees in SC and how they are distributed across various levels in the government. Group C/D employees indicate poor access to government services. So an estimate of SC employees within them and across all the levels would be an effective measure of whether only the rich among the scheduled castes are entering.

The above table shows that almost 80.8% of the SC employees are in Group C and Group D.

The latest data also shows the same picture, which is enclosed below: lesser representation for SC/ST/OBC in Groups A and B compared to Groups C and D.

Education is now an indicator of one’s economic level. Let us see how many of these scheduled caste employees were actually graduates or above

So clearly, we can see that 32% of them had a graduate degree. So we can conclude that more than 68% of them were economically weaker too.

In rural areas, 82% of the SC employees who were graduates had less than 1.23 acres, which shows that they are mostly from economically weaker sections with no family businesses or capital assets. Now, even across all educational levels, the range is from 76% to 89% of the employees did not own any assets, which shows that they are literally poor. In fact, 96% of the SC employees owned less than 5 acres of land.

This clearly shows that the relatively economically weak among the SCs in rural areas have benefitted from reservation in employment on a significant scale.