Moily has no love for creamy layer

He quotes a report saying inclusion of creamy layer will make OBCs lose out on benefits, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Oct 11, 2006, 22:02:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Former Karnataka Chief Minister and head of Oversight Committee Veeraappa Moily may not have given a definite recommendation on the creamy layer, but it has put forth its point of view on the issue.

In the final report submitted to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last week, Moily has quoted Rajiv Gandhi as votary of excluding the creamy layer while admitting political opposition.

Rajiv Gandhi was apprehensive that the 'exclusion of creamy layer will prevent the lower classes from losing the benefits of reservation to the upper layer'.

"The idea of allowing creamy layer will work against the OBC," the report states.

To further strengthen his argument, Moily took help of the draft National Sample Survey Organisation report.

"Analysis of the NSSO data clearly brings out that inclusion of the creamy layer in reserved seats will mean exempting the OBCs from the benefits," Moily said.

However, the section supporting inclusion of creamy layer in reservation regime viewed that seats may remain vacant in the initial years because of lack of eligible students.

Moily disagreed and quoted NSSO data to state that students from below the creamy layer perform even better than general category students.

Though the committee considered a proposal to allow admission of students covered under creamy layer only in the seats remaining vacant, Moily left the issue to be decided by the government.

An apparent reason for reaching this conclusion was the Cabinet's decision to include the creamy layer while discussing the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admissions) Bill, 2006.

Finally, the report stated that "in case it is decided not to exclude the creamy layer, the poorest among the OBCs would be placed at an disadvantage".

For the committee, a first-of-its-kind study on OBCs was done by the Planning Commission. The study says OBCs are close to general category in health parameters and land owning is much better than SCs.

The four southern states contribute 44 per cent to the country's OBC population, and Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra add another 40 per cent. Remaining have only 16 per cent OBCs.

Among OBCs in southern states and Maharashtra, about 68 per cent of them are covered by creamy layer guidelines of the Department of Personnel and Training. The planning commission extensively quotes NSSO to justify its study.

Other important points:

- No consensus on granting more autonomy to education institutions, including deciding pay packages of faculty and staff, independent of the UGC scales.

- Recommendation to increase the retirement age of faculty to 65 years has been reversed. Amid stiff protest from the Finance Ministry representative, the committee has recommended that retirement age of 62 should be uniform in all educational institutions.

- A number of members opposed the staggered implementation approach adopted by Veerappa Moily. As a result, institutes have different road maps for implementing the 27 per cent quota.

- There were also differences on additional teaching manpower in wake of increasing the intake by 54 per cent. Some said that selection norms should be relaxed while others wanted re-employment opportunities till 70 years for in-service teachers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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