In India’s caste-centred politics, reservation is, to use a mild word, a sensitive issue. And Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, who has taken India through the thick and thin of economic reforms since the mid-1980s, knows it all too well. But, if the country has to have world-class institutions, Ahluwalia feels, reservation for faculty is not a defensible idea. In an exclusive interview with Priyadarshi Siddhanta and Jayant Singh, he spells out the imperatives of reforms in education that are, if not more, as difficult as, economic reforms itself.
