While the government has made it clear it has no intention of re-visiting the debate over creamy layers in OBC reservations, it is making a huge mistake since it is incomes and not caste that are the major determinants of levels of education. Not just for OBCs or SC/STs, but even for upper caste Hindus. And this is something that is revealed by most surveys, whether it is the National Sample Survey of 1999-2000 or the Reproductive and Child Health Survey (RCHS), which was conducted over two years from 2002 to 2004 over 600,000 households across the country—the RCHS, in fact, has a sample size that is several times larger than the NSS. Read the rest of this entry »