With the leader of Gujarat’s Patidar agitation, Hardik Patel, making support for quotas in government jobs and education for his community a pre-condition for joining forces with the Congress for the forthcoming assembly elections, quota demands by dominant social groups are once again in focus. Jats in northern India and Marathas in Maharashtra are similarly placed as the Patels of Gujarat, rich landed gentry, sections of whom have made good in trade and commerce but have only a marginal presence in the learned professions, the rising sector of tech startups and the civil services. They also seek quotas, want to be treated on par with ‘other backward classes’. This shows how perverse the incentives arising from longstanding policy have become. It is time to overhaul the institutional structures giving rise to such demands.

Failure of the economy to produce jobs on a scale matching the rising demand for them is the immediate and obvious cause for quota demands: quotas increase your chance of getting a slice of the pie that fails to grow fast enough. Faster, more diversified growth that produces organised sector jobs is the answer. No wave of any magic wand can bring that about. Such growth would be the cumulative result of superior education across the board, change in India’s risk-averse culture, spread of formal finance, including venture capital and angel investment, beyond the narrow enclaves in which it operates now, creation of infrastructure that allows economic opportunities to make the transition from entrepreneurial imagination to running business, effective governance, social harmony and supportive politics. The challenge is to communicate this to disaffected groups, and disabuse them of the notion that quotas offer any kind of a solution.

A key requisite is for the political discourse to shift from offer of patronage to empowerment and enabling. The good news is that there is a shift in this direction, albeit not decisive enough. Honest politics would persevere with the change, instead of giving up on the people as too raw to digest the truth.