Should India Rethink About Reservations?

Indian law provides some percentage of seats in public and private education organizations and jobs in public sector. Reservations are part of Indian Constitution since independence. Since then there have been lot of changes to the reservation laws. At the time of Independence Indian society is highly divided, reservations are meant to reduce this divide and provide backward caste or minorities opportunities to move ahead in the society. This was a very good idea by those who worked on the constitution.

But now, reservation and politics got intertwined in such a way that it is very hard to separate them. Political party's started using reservations as a tool to gain vote share and come to power. People created organizations and political party's for different castes and religions, those started fighting for reservations for their cause. Political parties changed laws to provide additional reservations to different groups to gain political mileage. In recent years there has been a growing number of cases in supreme court against these kind of increases in reservations.

Supreme court gave an order clearly stating  that reservations should not exceed 50% unless only in special circumstances. But different states tried to exceed this limit, some did succeed and other are still trying.

Is this the right time for India to rethink about the present reservation system?  Government should empower every citizen to compete by providing free quality education to all. Reservation's in higher education doesn't really achieve the goal of equality if there is lack of quality education at school level.