The government has also extended quotas to promotions. After decades of constitutionally sanctioned efforts to protect and promote sectarian preferences, India is caught in an escalating cycle of increasing numbers of groups putting forth expanding claims to entitlements. If membership in a particular group confers unequal privileges, and if job markets and prospects for upward mobility are stagnant or shrinking, then fraudulent claims of membership in the target groups will multiply. The spiraling cycle of preferential entitlements, and the need to ensure against fraudulent claims, leads to an expanding role for government at a time when India needs to reduce government intrusion into the economy and society. Within ''disadvantaged'' groups receiving preferential treatment, benefits are captured by the better educated, more articulate and more politically skilled elite.
Preferential policies are a political response to symbols of sectarian identity.
They create and nurture vested interests. The programs are meant to reduce and eliminate intergroup disparities, but group leaders are dependent for their leadership positions on the perpetuation of perceived disparities. A solution of ethnic or gender problems would deprive the leaders of a platform and a role. Upping the ante by raising ever expanding demands enlarges the role of group activists and gives them a bigger stage from which to manipulate more people. Caste is now being used in India as a system for distributing political spoils.