There was functionally no public education system available to most Indians until a decent bit after Independence, and even now most rural communities have atro

There was functionally no public education system available to most Indians until a decent bit after Independence, and even now most rural communities have atrocious schooling standards with chronically absentee teachers. India has been an extremely poor country for a long time. It’s not a situation like the US where there were plenty of opportunities available and some segment of society is gated out of them. Almost all Indians save for a narrow clade of people who worked directly under the imperial administration of the British Empire had access to anything, and even those were the cream of the crop from the pre-British days who could translate their prior privileges to getting ahead of their peers in the rat race. It’s basically tautological to say OBCs are underrepresented in the upper echelons of society. That’s literally how the category is defined. The system was set up from colonialism on down to leave very few positions with contemporary standards of dignity for “natives” to occupy.