What did Ambedkar say to the argument that reservation sacrifices merit?
He took the concern seriously enough to write it into the Constitution, and answered it deeper down by questioning what "merit" means in an unequal society. The text itself holds the two things in balance: the article permitting reservation in public service requires that the claims of the disadvantaged be weighed alongside the efficiency of administration. He did not pretend efficiency did not matter; he built the tension into the clause rather than wishing it away.
But his sharper reply went to the word merit itself. What passes for merit, on his analysis, is largely inherited advantage — the schooling, the books, the encouragement, the freedom from humiliation that some are born into and others are systematically denied. To call the result of a rigged race pure merit, and the correction of it a sacrifice of merit, is to mistake the starting positions for the running. A society that shut a fifth of its people out of learning for centuries cannot then treat the gap it created as proof of their lesser worth.
So he framed reservation not as the abandonment of merit but as the condition for finding it — the removal of a birth-based barrier so that ability wherever it lies has a chance to show. The efficiency of the state, on this view, is served, not harmed, by drawing on the whole population instead of one slice of it. Whether the policy in practice achieves that is a real and separate argument; the answer to the merit objection in principle is that the race was never fair to begin with.