The Punjab and Haryana high court on Thursday temporarily suspended a Haryana law that reserved 75% jobs in the state within a salary bracket for local residents, halting the state’s controversial push to assuage discontent over an employment crunch by introducing domicile quotas. The following day, the state appealed the Supreme Court.
There is no doubt that the Indian economy is facing a serious employment crisis. The only way to successfully deal with this challenge is to focus on a
The Punjab and Haryana high court on Thursday temporarily suspended a Haryana law that reserved 75% jobs in the state within a salary bracket for local residents, halting the state’s controversial push to assuage discontent over an employment crunch by introducing domicile quotas. The following day, the state appealed the Supreme Court.
There is no doubt that the Indian economy is facing a serious employment crisis. The only way to successfully deal with this challenge is to focus on a sustained growth revival which gives not only a quantitative but also a qualitative boost to jobs. Laws such as the one brought by the Haryana government – and it is not the only state trying this tactic -- attempt to circumvent this larger political economy challenge by adopting a populist short cut. Instead of taking on the larger challenge of delivering sustained growth and enough (and quality) jobs, governments bringing such laws are trying to mislead restless unemployed voters by suggesting that their employment woes are a result of people from other states taking away what should have rightfully been theirs. This is both diversionary (the job crisis is a national, not a state problem) as well as divisive. India’s labour market cannot be fragmented into states, and migrants cannot be blamed for usurping jobs.
Increasing proliferation of policies is also bad news for India’s social justice ideals. Our founding fathers envisaged reservations for marginalised communities in the hope that India will eventually achieve B R Ambedkar’s cherished goal of annihilation of caste. While India has done relatively well in terms of achieving social equity, caste and its ill-effects continue to prevail in Indian society and its subconscious. The experience of the last seven decades also tells us that the eradication of caste-based prejudice requires social reform, not just legal recognition of equality.
Reservations were envisaged as a remedy for historic discrimination rather than economic deprivation. Demands for reservation for local residents; or including hitherto dominant peasant castes among the ranks of those who are currently entitled to reservations; or providing the benefits of reservation to the economically weaker sections among the upper castes, are all steps aimed at using the same strategy to tackle deprivation. Not only is this bound to fail – there are not enough jobs to begin with, so the benefits of reserved jobs will be even smaller – it continues to feed into the “meritocratic” prejudice against the policy of reservations.
Reservations don’t compromise merit. In fact, research has shown they can boost merit and productivity as long as they are used as a tool for allowing access to historically excluded sections. But they can’t be mutated for political expediency into devising exclusionary criterion for the pursuit of imagined remedies. That is antithetical to the goal of equality.
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