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THE BIGGEST RAILWAY recruitment exercise in recent times has claimed more than 40 lives and led to destruction of property worth lakhs of rupees not to mention the incalculable damage to the collective national identity. Ironically, the recruitment drive was intended to save human lives being lost in rail accidents.

Yet, this tragedy was entirely avoidable, triggered as it was by the requirement that a candidate applying for a job in a particular Railway Division should take the selection examination only in that area. There is no reason why candidates in Bihar should be required to travel all the way to Assam or any other place merely because vacancies exist only there. They could just as easily have been made to take the examination at the place of their choice but asked to denote by their order of preference where they would want to be posted. There should be no serious logistical difficulties in implementing such a system. Indeed, the all-India civil services examination is conducted along the same principle, with a successful candidate taking the exam in Chennai ending up being posted in Kolkata on completion of training based on his ranking of various locations and his own rank in the order of merit of selection. Extending this concept to Railway recruitment would not only not have exacerbated regional tensions, that always remain just beneath the surface, it would have also been seen as a more humane approach to selection. After all, it would have saved the aspirants the additional financial burden of spending to travel long distances in search of jobs when the odds of landing one are no better than one in hundred. As much as those who indulged in the violence, politicians advocating some kind of regional reservation in public sector appointments are in the wrong. Not only from a purely legal perspective, reservation of jobs on the basis of purely regional affiliations is entirely untenable going as it does against the basic principles of the Constitution and judicial pronouncements; it also makes a mockery of the core principles of nationhood.

Also, if politicians think that regional reservations would end all social strife they are sadly mistaken. It is only a matter of time before someone else picks on that theme and demands sub-regional affiliations. They would do well to remember that there is a constant clamour for reshaping regional identities, if the agitation currently on for the formation of Vidarbha in Maharashtra and Telengana in Andhra Pradesh is anything to go by. The country would also lose the moral high ground in the global debate over outsourcing of jobs. If India is unable to resolve the internal disputes over local jobs, New Delhi would hardly be in a position to tell the United States or the European Union that their attempts at preserving jobs for their people is anti free-trade.

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