Has reservation worked?
This is the hardest question in the archive to answer honestly, for two reasons. It is about what happened after 1956, which is past the edge of a site about Ambedkar's life; and it is a question on which serious, informed people reach opposite conclusions from the same evidence. What follows is therefore the shape of the argument, not a scoreline — and no figures are given here that have not been checked, because a confident number is the easiest way to lie about exactly this.
What is said on each side
- That it has done much of what it was for — putting members of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes into legislatures, universities and public employment where before there were almost none, and building, over decades, an educated middle class within communities that had been shut out of both learning and office.
- That it has fallen short — that its benefits have gathered among the better-off within the listed groups while the poorest are barely reached, that discrimination persists alongside the quota rather than dissolving under it, and that a measure meant to end the relevance of caste can end up entrenching it.
Both of these can be true at once, which is why the argument does not resolve. It is worth separating the strands Ambedkar himself kept apart: he designed political reservation as a temporary safeguard and expected it to lapse, while treating exclusion in employment and education as a disability that would not lift on a fixed timetable. Much of today's dispute — over the creamy layer, the fifty per cent ceiling, the extension to other groups — concerns policy made after his death and cannot be laid at his door either way.
So the site does what it does everywhere a question is genuinely open: it lays out the disagreement and writes no resolving sentence. Whether reservation has worked depends on what you demand of it and which evidence you weigh, and an honest page cannot pretend that choice has been made for you.