Beyond Caste: What Andhra’s Muslim Quotas Reveal About the Future of Equality
A contested 4 percent quota for disadvantaged Muslims reveals how belief, data, and design decide the real outcomes of equality policy
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Mitul Surana: IIM Indore
Rajnish Rai: IIM Ahmedabad
SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities | SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment
Few policies in India have spent as much time in the courts, or in people’s lives, as Andhra Pradesh’s 2007 quota for disadvantaged Muslim groups. Introduced to narrow educational and social gaps, it has been contested in law for nearly two decades. Yet it quietly reshaped how families think about schooling and work.
The Andhra experiment shows that when inclusion creates incentives for effort, not just entitlements to protection, it can change behaviour as powerfully as any economic reform. Across democracies, where equality debates often pit identity against opportunity, its story offers a subtler insight: trust, not decree, is what makes affirmative action endure.
A New Kind of Affirmative Action
The Constitution empowers the state to promote socially and educationally backward classes, a phrase long interpreted through caste-based disadvantage. Religion-based quotas, by contrast, have always been politically and legally sensitive.
Andhra Pradesh broke that mould. The state identified 14 backward Muslim communities as socially and educationally backward, placed them within the Other Backward Classes list, and extended a 4 percent quota in government jobs and higher education. The better-off were excluded through the creamy layer rule – a filter that bars relatively affluent families within disadvantaged groups from claiming benefits.
The rationale was corrective, not communal. The 2006 Sachar Committee identified substantial socio-economic disadvantages among Muslims, particularly in education. Census 2011 data shows that only about one in five Muslims had completed secondary school, compared with nearly 30 percent nationally, and just 5.2 percent held college degrees – roughly 4 percentage points below the national average. Notably, none of Andhra Pradesh’s districts were included in the central government’s Multi-Sectoral Development Programme for minorities (2008–09), making the state’s own initiative the only large-scale inclusion effort of its kind.
A Constitutional Tightrope
From the start, Andhra’s initiative tested constitutional limits. Earlier attempts in 2004 and 2005 had offered a 5 percent quota to all Muslims, which the High Court struck down for conflating religion with backwardness. The 2007 version narrowed eligibility to specific disadvantaged sub-groups, using social and educational criteria rather than religious identity.
Even so, the court invalidated it again in 2010, and the case has since awaited a final Supreme Court verdict. The key question is whether recognising backwardness within a religion violates secularism, or whether it represents a constitutionally valid socio-economic classification.
Indian jurisprudence offers guidance. In a 1992 case, the Supreme Court held that backwardness can exist in any community, provided it is empirically proven and not presumed. Secularism, in this view, is not blindness to identity but even-handedness toward disadvantage. The Andhra High Court described this as “benign neutrality that advances the good of all.”
When Expectation Becomes Incentive
The data, drawn from India’s National Family Health Surveys (2015–16 and 2019–21), reveal that the measure worked. Among the targeted Muslim groups, average years of education rose by 0.54 – almost half a year. The sharpest gains came among those aged 6 to 11 – by 0.86 years – precisely those young enough for families to adjust long-term schooling plans.
In a population where barely one in twenty have completed college, such shifts mark meaningful behavioural change. Parents recognised that university seats and public jobs could alter life trajectories and began investing in education accordingly.
More strikingly, this happened even as the policy’s legality remained uncertain. Since its inception, the quota has been under challenge in courts. Yet families acted as though the opportunity was durable: expectation became a public good.
Who Gains, Who Lags Behind
Opportunity, however, did not reach everyone equally. Middle-income households within the identified Muslim groups gained the most, by almost a full year. The poorest, by contrast, did not benefit at all. For them, the barrier was not intent but infrastructure: without reliable schools or transport, opportunity could not be converted into action. The wealthiest, excluded by the creamy-layer rule, saw no change.
This pattern reflects a familiar feature of Indian welfare: eligibility may be pro-poor, but uptake is often middle-class. Yet that is not necessarily a flaw. It shows which households are best positioned to respond when opportunity becomes visible – the aspiring lower-middle class that converts hope into action. For policymakers, recognising and designing around that behavioural pivot is crucial.
The gender story is more sobering. While Muslim men gained close to 0.8 years of additional schooling under the quota, women’s improvement was modest, at 0.4 years on average. The barriers they face are layered: economic, social, and institutional. For many girls, the obstacle is not ambition but logistics: the distance to schools, unsafe transport, and the absence of female teachers or secure hostels. In such settings, even well-designed inclusion policies lose traction and incentives weaken long before the opportunity arrives.
Designing Inclusion That Lasts
For policymakers, three lessons stand out.
Evidence builds credibility. The Andhra study isolated the policy’s effects by comparing Muslim groups within the same state, excluding other reserved categories. Linking household surveys with education and employment data allows governments to identify and monitor disadvantages transparently.
Scaffolding sustains inclusion. Increasing the welfare net depends on institutional support: safe transport, reliable infrastructure, and targeted scholarships that turn potential into participation. For women, especially, such anchors determine whether opportunity can be used at all – inclusion fails when they cannot reach or remain in school safely.
Expectation amplifies impact. Families in Andhra responded not to a verdict but to a belief that the policy would endure. Trust, once created, can multiply the effects of policy more powerfully than compulsion.
Beyond Numbers, Toward Capability
The policy has continued for nearly 20 years under interim judicial orders. It is a reminder that governance, not just law, shapes the lived meaning of constitutional rights. Whatever the Court’s final ruling, Andhra’s long-running experiment already shows that the debate on reservation arithmetic – the 50 percent ceiling – is less potent than whether such policies actually expand capability.
Quotas can act as signals only if pathways stay open. Without jobs, skills, private-sector inclusion, and safe learning environments, the promise of opportunity can fade into frustration.
Towards Inclusive Equality
India’s equality conversation has never stood still. Each generation redefines fairness for its own time. The Andhra Pradesh model, though still under judicial watch, expands that conversation. It shows how affirmative action can adapt while remaining empirical and secular.
The task now is to turn those lessons into a new grammar of inclusion – one that links education to employment, complements quotas with gender-sensitive design, and sustains expectation as a public good.
Affirmative action cannot erase history, but it can tilt the balance toward fairness. When citizens begin to believe that opportunity belongs to them, the state’s promise comes closest to being fulfilled.
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Authors:
The discussion in this article is based on the authors’ research published in Economic Inquiry (Volume 63). Views are personal.