Centre for Development Economics
Department of Economics
Delhi School of Economics
ANNOUNCE A SEMINAR
Affirmative Action’s Cumulative Fractional Assignments
by
Manshu Khanna
(Peking University)
(Thursday, August 1, 2024, at 3:30 PM IST )
Venue: Amex Room
Abstract:-
The Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Act, 2019 provides for reserving teaching vacancies in India’s central educational institutions for beneficiaries of its affirmative action policy. Reservation of teaching vacancies had been a contentious issue, and the act was introduced to resolve it after the Supreme Court’s solution was met with protests from the Teachers’ Union. Our paper demonstrates an impossibility result in the Supreme Court’s solution and the act, which are flawed in reserving seats simultaneously at both the university and within its departments. To overcome this impossibility, we propose an alternative solution based on approximate implementation of fractional assignments, offering a promising middle-ground between the two disputed solutions practiced in India. This novel application demonstrates the practical relevance of the approximate implementation approach (Akbarpour and Nikzad (2020)) beyond the constraint structures examined in the literature
.