@perry first of all, thank you for your thoughtful comment and engagement !
Unfortunately, I am unable to look at that Caravan article, as it requires me to register. Feel free to send me the entire article via DM. But that may actually not be required I feel (see below)
Your understanding is significantly off the mark. The talk was short, and not all details can be covered in that. During my talk I referred to “overbooking” etc - and you may have missed the significance of that. I also had a slide which shows how I define “diversity” - the “Trump” one. My personal example might have thrown you off a bit - and I can’t blame you for that 
I presented this idea to another volunteer prior to the conference, and got a similar rebuttal. Then I was able to explain to them what “diversity” means, and they then appreciated my explanation. I will explain it exactly the same way to you too.
I’ve found that the word “diversity” is significantly misinterpreted to mean “affirmative action” (picking the most suitable word from your post). But it is not so. So what is diversity ?
India has been called the land of unity in diversity, melting pot of races, we have hundreds of languages, etc. In general, large Indian crowds tend to be reasonable “diverse” - as in :more representative" of India. But smaller samples of those ? Not necessarily - a good example of which is the IndiaFOSS crowd. How would you measure how diverse the conference was ? We don’t collect any attendee data right now, so that’s ruled out. And we can’t curate for diversity in the crowd of “merit” - i.e. the working professionals - as that won’t be seen as appropriate.
As my talk slides show, the students are a more diverse crowd. Not all of them get into jobs, women are a higher percentage, and reservations for various quotas make it an interesting crowd. Going into an expensive college can’t guarantee anyone a job either - but then not all of those folks need jobs either. Get the idea of what diversity means ? It’s not “merit”. It’s representation, looked at from different aspects. Just so that you understand - an ultra rich student represents diversity, as much as somebody who is in 4rd year of engineering at age 26 (is that possible these days??), and similarly an exchange student from an African country studying in any college. We can do diversity on the basis of interesting attributes - e.g. which language is the mother tongue, location of college, etc.
Precisely speaking, Diversity curation is sampling various homogeneous pools for representation. Homogeneous pools are formed using data as the basis. But those buckets are formed for random sampling, not to discriminate based on attributes. Small pools represent outliers in the data - giving them better chances of being picked. Making high quality buckets may or may not need extensive analysis. We will know what’s required only when we get the data.
With IndiaFOSS, we’ll most likely have venue capacity constraints even when we go to a larger venue. The RSVP system is put in place - because we don’t have to tell anyone exactly how many tickets we have/can/will make space for. The lower cost ticket comes gives us visibility into what our crowd looks like - right now we are clueless. People don’t even which college had how many students at our conference. We need KYC - Know Your Crowd. We can then pick folks based on the data - as an example we can make sure no more than N students from ABC college get tickets, allocating in round-robin basis, etc. This will break some social dynamics - no group booking, and less chance of somebody and their friend both getting a ticket. But we can mitigate this by offering some discoverability based on opt-in basis. But overall all this is far more “fair” from the POV of the objectives of FOSS United as a Not For Profit.
Finally, the lower cost of the ticket/RSVP allows us to understand potentially how many students aspire to be at IndiaFOSS. Assuming that one fine day we will have FREE tickets, I would still not let students in without curation. Simply because this will put us volunteers at risk - the student would want to show up at the last minute on a whim. “Free” is a bad word after all.
So why Rs 256 - it’s 2x roughly of the workshop cost. So even a student who attends for 1 day will be happy ! Hope that helps.
