How to De-reserve Reserves: Admissions to Technical Colleges in India
Date
2021-04-13
Authors
Aygün, Orhan
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Abstract
We study the joint implementation of reservation and de-reservation policies in
India that has been enforcing comprehensive affirmative action since 1950. The landmark
judgment of the Supreme Court of India in 2008 mandated that whenever OBC
category (with 27 percent reservation) has unfilled positions, they must be reverted to
general category applicants in admissions to public schools without specifying how to
implement it. We disclose the drawbacks of the recently reformed allocation procedure
in admissions to technical colleges and offer a solution through ”de-reservation via
choice rules.” We propose a novel priority design—Backward Transfers (BT) choice
rule—for institutions and the deferred acceptance mechanism under these choice rules
(DA-BT) for centralized clearinghouses. We show that DA-BT corrects the shortcomings
of existing mechanisms. By formulating India’s legal requirements and policy
goals as formal axioms, we show that the DA-BT mechanism is unique for the concurrent
implementation of reservation and de-reservation policies.
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21002
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Type
working paper