Caste and unmanageable technology

Anil Saari Arora poses some relevant questions in this article:
'For instance, about ten years ago, in his voluble and forcefully argued essays and pamphlets against the OBC reservations proposed by the Mandal Commission - Arun Shourie, one of the more widely respected intellectuals of the modern Indian elite, asked his readers whether we should accept doctors, engineers, etc, who were not qualified to perform the critical professional assignments that their new status would grant them if the Mandal Commission’s recommendations were implemented?For Arun Shourie’s target audience, his question assumed the force of a rallying point : Indian society had to be “saved” from the incompetence and the professional maladies which the Mandal Commission’s recommendations would unleash upon India. Of course, both Shourie and his intellectual disciples ignored the empirical data in this regard – that is, the number of recorded engineering and construction scams (including the poor quality of earthquake-ruptured apartment houses in Ahmedabad and Bhuj, in January 2001) and several well-known medical blunders that owed their origin to the doings and misdoings of educated, upper class, upper caste Indians. Arun Shourie’s populist argument was thereafter to prompt us to wear blinkers regarding the increasing deterioration of professional competence among upper class Indians. Not simply the OBC, the Scheduled Caste or Muslim professional and entrepreneur alone.Now that Arun Shourie has become one of the intellectuals-in-administration (a minister in the NDA government) perhaps he could do a good turn to society at large by undertaking an empirical collation of data regarding the managements of the Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) that he has to “privatize’ as the Union Minister of Disinvestment.It would be helpful to the understanding of the equation between Caste Identity and Management-Technical Skills, if we had the data listing the caste-wise identification of all the heads and departmental heads of the “sick” Public Sector Undertakings, over the years. To more fully understand the validity of Arun Shourie’s caste-linked theories about vocational skills, a caste-wise listing of Public Sector chairpersons, managers and senior technocrats should also be collated as essential data.Only after this empirical data is collected and analyzed can we arrive at an honest evaluation of four important questions: (i) How competent and capable are professional and technological standards prevailing in the country? (ii) Is there a relevance for a Caste-based qualification in the contemporary era, regarding senior-level appointments? (iii) What is the caste-wise division of those senior managers and technocrats of the Public Sector Undertakings who have not worked in the public and the national interest, because they have been guilty of financial mismanagement, misappropriation and misguidance, which has made the numerous public sector units financially unviable, sick, industrial units? (iv) Whether there is a justification in believing that the principle of hereditary caste identity, ipso facto, imbues those born into certain castes with an intrinsic “superiority” and those born into certain other castes with an intrinsic “inferiority”, as far as human intelligence, competencies and skills are concerned?'