Who's afraid of the numbers?

'However, Indians may well ask: what is after all the relevance of these studies of caste in pre-British or ``traditional'' India? Hasn't it changed significantly today?
The sad fact about the state of Indian sociology today is that we have no empirical data to answer such questions. The Indian state and its supporting intellectuals have been antagonistic to gathering caste data, as indicated by the continuing refusal to collect data on ``caste'' identification in the census - and sociologists have, if anything, been more backward. For instance, while in the U.S. there is not only official data on race linking it with economic position and other criteria, but race/ethnic relations has been the subject of much research, including studies showing the rates of inter-marriage among different ethnic groups. In India there is nothing: we can search our experience, look at matrimonial ads in newspapers and make guesses that, well, some things have changed but most marriages remain traditional - but we have absolutely no scientific surveys to test any hypotheses. There are no studies of actual inter- mariage rates, almost no studies in a region larger than a village that test the correlation of jati with economic position. '
So do OBCs need reservations, or more importantly, are they socially, economically, educationally backward? How does one answer this question? One simple indicator would be their number in jobs in government- at the centre and in the states and in government companies, agencies etc., Let's take the year marked by Mandal, not the earlier years that Mandal studied, 1990, as the period to be studied. It's my view that the figures would shock everyone.
In 2006, there are 22.5 lakh unfilled jobs, reserved for the SCs, in government. And they remained unfilled mostly because ..the elite isn't in any hurry to fill them and not just because there aren't enough qualified applicants to fill them.
And the OBCs who managed to secure reservations in the Central Government around ten years ago?