Redesigning Reservation: An Institutional Alternative to Quota-based reservation in India

Abstract

India's reservation system has never, in the record reviewed here, seen a benefit withdrawn once granted — a pattern usually treated as a political observation rather than argued as a mechanism. This paper makes two contributions. First, it states that pattern as a formal, testable diagnosis: group-based classification creates a rent that makes political mobilization the rational strategy for defending or expanding a category, while courts remain the only actor able to constrain the pattern, and only by setting an outer ceiling rather than redesigning the underlying allocation logic. Second, building on this diagnosis, it develops a fully specified institutional alternative — a continuous, multi-domain "deficit-point" system scoring verified individual circumstance rather than group membership, administered by a two-body governance structure designed with direct reference to the documented failure modes of India's own insulated institutions (the Reserve Bank, TRAI, SEBI, the Finance Commission, the Lokpal, and the National Judicial Appointments Commission) — a design that mitigates several of those failure modes but, as the paper states directly in Section 6.5 and Section 6.7, does not claim to close all of them, and leaves at least one (direct political pressure of the kind that produced the RBI's 2018 Section 7 episode) as an acknowledged, unresolved exposure. The comparative claim for individual over group targeting is stated in falsifiable form, with named conditions under which it should be expected to fail. The paper then turns its own diagnostic apparatus on its own proposal, concluding that no presently identifiable legal or political pathway would adopt this design under current conditions — and argues, following the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction in political philosophy, that this finding does not make the diagnosis or the design wrong, only currently unactionable.

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