Jayant Bhandari explains How Not To Dismantle the Caste System:
I was brought up in a well-off family. I did my schooling in a private, missionary school. We all wore the same kind of uniform. And we had to sing a relatively secular prayer in the mornings. All this meant that our understanding of the caste system of India was mostly academic. This equanimity about the caste system did not last. After school when we went to the state-run university, most of us soon learned to look down on the lower caste — courtesy of the state.After finishing the school, I went through an extremely competitive entrance examination to get admission into engineering. Those who gained admission were to become social heroes. I remember that the minimum required of the higher caste to gain admission was a score over 70 percent. Because of affirmative action, those of the lower caste had reserved seats.
Unfortunately, the state of public school education — in ‘schools’ that often had no buildings or teachers — is so utterly bad that most of the lower-caste people who joined us knew close to nothing. Most of them had entered the university with exam scores under 10 percent. (Even negative scores were not unheard of.)
As a part of the social engineering process, I was not to get my own room in the student hall of residence. I was allotted a room with someone from a lower caste. We had nothing in common. Even our Hindi was so entirely different that we hardly understood each other. My roommate had probably never seen a proper road or slept under a non-thatched roof until he moved in. He certainly had no concept of gas cooking and was unaccustomed to the usage of electricity.