Every year around this time, India has the same argument with itself. JEE Advanced results drop, newspapers print cutoff tables, and somewhere on social media someone declares that reservations are destroying meritocracy. This year, the data make that argument harder to sustain. SC candidates qualifying for the Indian Institutes of Technology jumped to 50.16% in 2026, up from 40.41% in 2025. ST qualification rates rose to 42.14% from 33.99%. Women recorded their highest qualification rate in six years. These are not marginal movements. They are the kind of swings that, in any other context, would be read as evidence of expanding opportunity rather than its erosion.

The temptation is to treat this as a technical story about exam difficulty or coaching-industry penetration. It is more useful to treat it as a chapter in a much older story: the two-century-long struggle over who gets to be educated in India, and on whose terms.

A system built to exclude, not include

It is worth remembering how recent the very idea of mass, merit-based technical education is in India. For most of the eighteenth century, higher learning here meant Sanskrit scholarship largely confined to Brahmins, and Persian education shared between elite Hindus and Muslims. Physical sciences, technology, and geography were simply absent from the curriculum. The East India Company, when it finally took an interest in education, did so to produce clerks for its own courts. Warren Hastings founded the Calcutta Madrasah in 1781 for Muslim law, and Jonathan Duncan opened a Sanskrit College at Varanasi in 1791 for Hindu law and philosophy. Neither institution was built to discover talent wherever it existed. Both were built to reproduce an administrative class.

Even when the British did gesture toward wider education through the 1813 Charter Act's token allocation of one lakh rupees, the money sat unspent for a decade. By 1886, colonial India's government was spending barely one crore rupees on education out of nearly 47 crore in net revenue. The constraint was never a shortage of ability among Indians. It was a shortage of institutional will to look for it.

Against that backdrop, the modern IIT system, established in 1950 with IIT Kharagpur founded in 1951 as the first of its kind, represented something genuinely new: an attempt to build meritocratic selection into the architecture of the state itself, rather than leaving it to birth, patronage, or caste. The irony is that this new system inherited, almost by default, the social geography of the old one. Access to the coaching, schooling, and family capital needed to crack a brutally competitive exam tracked the same lines that had determined access to Sanskrit colleges and British clerkships a century earlier.

What "merit" quietly assumes

The reservation debate in India is almost always framed as a conflict between merit and social justice, as though these are opposing forces pulling the system in different directions. That framing has a long and not entirely flattering history of its own. Reformers like the Derozians in early nineteenth-century Bengal fought precisely this battle against entrenched privilege, agitating for public education, press freedom, and Indian entry into higher government service. Surendranath Banerjea called them "the pioneers of the modern civilization of Bengal," and their core insight was that formal equality of rules means little when the starting line is staggered by centuries of exclusion.

That insight did not vanish with independence. The post-Revolt colonial state, for its own cynical reasons, often manipulated religious and caste divisions in access to government service and education, turning the "attractions of government service" into a tool of control rather than mobility. The British were also, by their own officials' admission, wary of disturbing caste hierarchies too aggressively, fearing orthodox backlash; serious social reform, including the fight against untouchability, was left, as contemporaries recognized, to "the government of a free India."

Reservations in IITs and other institutions are one of that free government's attempts to make good on the promise. They were never a deviation from meritocracy so much as an argument about what meritocracy requires: not just an open door, but a credible path to it.

Reading this year's numbers honestly

None of this history proves that every reservation policy is well designed, or that current cutoffs and category criteria are beyond criticism. It does suggest that the sudden, sharp rise in SC and ST qualification rates this year deserves a more curious response than either triumphalism or suspicion.

Source: Indian Institutes of Technology

A jump of this size, with SC rates rising nearly ten percentage points and ST rates rising over eight, in a single year is unusual enough to warrant real investigation: is it driven by expanded coaching access, demographic shifts in the applicant pool, changes in exam design, or something else? But the instinctive reach for "the exam must have gotten easier" or "standards are slipping" reveals an assumption that reserved-category candidates qualifying in larger numbers is itself suspicious, rather than a signal that barriers to preparation are finally thinning. That assumption rarely survives contact with the historical record, which shows opportunity in India has almost always been rationed, and every expansion of it has been met with claims that standards were falling.

The same logic applies to the women's qualification rate reaching a six-year high. Girls have not suddenly become more capable; coaching ecosystems, parental attitudes, and school-level encouragement have been slowly, unevenly shifting. If a six-year high is news, it is because a six-year low was never treated as a crisis of talent, only as background noise.

Merit was always a moving target

The deeper point is that "merit," in any selection system, is never a pure measurement of innate ability. It is a measurement of ability refracted through access to preparation, and access has been the variable India has manipulated, deliberately or by neglect, since the Calcutta Madrasah and the Varanasi Sanskrit College. The IITs did not invent a level playing field in 1951; they inherited an unlevel one and have spent seventy-five years trying, imperfectly, to regrade it.

Seen this way, rising SC and ST qualification rates are not a story about reservations undermining standards. They are a story, centuries in the making, about a country slowly discovering more of its own talent because it finally bothered to look for it. The honest debate is not merit versus justice. It is whether India is willing to keep investing in the access that makes merit measurable at all, rather than mistaking a historically narrow talent pool for the only one that ever existed.