Merit, Capital and Middle Class: Exploring the Linkages

Taniya Chakrabarty

Indian Journal of Human Development, 2022, vol. 16, issue 1, 158-168

Abstract: Earlier this year in January 2022, the Supreme Court of India in its judgement on the counselling process for the stalled centralised medical entrance validated the need for reservations and elaborated on the much-debated issue of merit vs. reservation. In India, there has been a long-standing debate over whether reservations impinge on the idea of merit. This article attempts to crucially appraise the very idea of merit in contemporary societies. Further, through an exploration of its characteristics and the process of its construction and reproduction, this article attempts to trace the origins of merit in the Indian context and understand its importance in relation to caste as well as class, particularly in relation with the middle classes; in doing so, this article will seek to understand how merit as a notion is constructed and operationalised in academic and employment discourse and whether the claim of equality of opportunity translates into equality of outcome.

Keywords: Merit; middle class; elite reproduction; equality of opportunity; equality of outcome (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09737030221099328 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:inddev:v:16:y:2022:i:1:p:158-168

DOI: 10.1177/09737030221099328

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Indian Journal of Human Development
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().