The Hindu Business Line : RESERVATIONS ON A LEGISLATION

Coalition governments reflect contending stances on issues, but one would expect a unified approach to employment-intensive growth. With India gearing for double-digit growth, what with the industrial sector reinventing itself along global lines, one would have expected policy-makers to do their bit to push the slow-pacers, agriculture and infrastructure, so as to increase employment. While one section of the government wants the market to feed the growth impulses, another appears to think that legislation will do the trick. The economy has moved too far and fast to consider the latter a favourable option.

The Group of Ministers working on reservation for the Scheduled Castes/Tribes and Other Backward Communities in the private sector has submitted its recommendations to the Cabinet. To strengthen the case for private sector reservations, the Union Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment, Ms Meira Kumar, reeled off names of prominent industrialists who approved the idea. Reservation may spread to the corporate sector, but that will not make it beneficial either for the economy or the SCs/STs. Every affirmative action policy has context. Reservation seemed to make sense in the era of rampant social and economic discrimination, a small industrial base and backward farm production. With not enough opportunities to absorb the growing work force except in the public sector, state intervention via a reservation policy seemed appropriate. Yet, 60 years on, a larger number of SCs/STs are below the poverty line than those from other communities; a significantly larger number of the educated among them may be unemployed too. The Minister uses this to justify reservation. But these are the effects of two different sets of policy failures and need different correctives. The former reflects the failure of the food policies while the latter spells the inability of a sluggish economy to create jobs.

Legislating on reservations in the private sector will not make poverty go away or create incomes. The former requires more efficient government aid, cheaper food and resources for basic education; the latter, new skills to climb the modern economy's ladder. Equally, an infrastructure for finance and other resources to generate entrepreneurship among the more daring and ambitious through a public-private partnership would help in asset building and the economy far more than reservations. Policy-makers must dovetail the efforts of their departments to foster start-ups and to train workers instead of passing the buck to the private sector for what is essentially a limited-entry mechanism into the job market.

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