Yes except the only metric that Universities in India can use to give you admission is your score on a centralized public examination. No essays, no discretion what soever. They have to publish a huge list of everyone's scores and the top n people get in.

Further, there is actually reservation for poor people from lower castes (25 - 50% of the seats). So it's not the same thing. I don't disagree with ingenium that better socio-economic opportunities help richer people do better, but the discrimination against lower caste people is not systemic in higher education.