Not ABC but OBC -Governance Now

Not ABC but OBC

Even seven cut-offs did not help her

Sonam Saigal | July 20, 2011

Some girls are special, not because they have special abilities, but because they learn what is OBC before ABC. Other backward classes. Like my domestic help’s daughter who thought, this was a class just like classes in school, which would get over once school did. But it didn’t.

After she finished class 10, she learnt that OBC was more important than ABC. While applying in colleges, everyone first asked her, her class. To which she would proudly reply, first class. Only to realise it was not that class they wanted to know but the social class she belonged to, which was OBC.

For undergraduate courses in Delhi University (DU), there is a separate cut-off for her and others like her. And that her cut-off was different from that of majority of other students applying in DU.

Colleges are supposed to give a 10 percent relaxation for every course for OBC students and that too was not exercised in all colleges, until the supreme court intervened.

The HRD minister was also forced to look into it because many of the category students seats go vacant every year. So this year they decided that all of the 27 percent seats allotted for them should be full.

While she saw many of her friends who were not like her (they were from general category) rejoice on making it to their choice of course and college, she had to give up on the college she wished to go to as they refused to lower their cut-offs, because if they admitted students like her with not-so-high marks, it would hamper their educational standards.

Despite seven cut-off lists for students like her, she had to take admission in an off-campus college, in a course not of her choice. While submitting her form she was humiliated on showing her OBC certificate and was ridiculed – somebody talked of forged OBC certificates.

When she asked her father for money to submit as college fees, he did not allow her to take admission in her last-option college because it was very far from her home and they could not afford hostel accommodation. So she had to withdraw from studying even her last-option course and take up a home science course in an institute close to her house which admitted students who belonged to OBC.

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