D.Parthasarathy
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

The debate on reservations as one of the affirmative action policy measures in India has largely revolved around issues of merit and efficiency. While it is fairly easy to debunk the often ignorant and ill-informed ways in which these concepts have been used by those opposed to such policies, they are rarely questioned on the basis of a sociological imagination that is critical both for a better understanding of the problems involved as well to locate the whole debate in the larger context of the Indian social structure as it has evolved to its present stage.