Affirmative Action's Cumulative Fractional Assignments

TL;DR

This paper analyzes India's reservation policy in educational institutions, demonstrating an impossibility in current solutions and proposing an approximate fractional assignment method as a practical alternative.

Contribution

It reveals the flaws in existing reservation solutions and introduces a novel approximate fractional assignment approach applicable to complex reservation policies.

Findings

Impossibility of simultaneous seat reservation at university and department levels.

Proposed approximate fractional assignment method as a viable solution.

Demonstrated practical relevance of the approach beyond existing literature.

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 (Akbarpourand Nikzad(2020)) beyond the constraint structures examined in the literature.