Unworkable

The reservation of jobs and of seats in educational institutions for specific categories of people, based primarily on caste, is enshrined in the Constitution.

Over time, the categories of castes with claims to special treatment have got expanded, as also the reservation percentages "" provoking violent protests.

At one stage the Supreme Court put a 49 per cent ceiling on such reservation, but this has long since ceased to be operational. There are cases also where the most forward of castes and religious minorities have sought the benefits of reservation.

In yet other cases, state domicile becomes a factor, even when the job is in a central undertaking (recall what happened last year to candidates from Bihar who went to Assam in search of railway jobs). All this is evidence that reservations have become a political tool and one more facet of identity-based politics.

Reservations suggest scarcity. You reserve seats in colleges when demand exceeds supply and selection has to be done on some rational (or rationing) basis.

Increasingly, this is no longer the case. The mushrooming of private professional colleges, teaching not just medicine and engineering but also management, TV production, cooking, fashion design and what have you, has meant that someone excluded from admission in any particular institute can go elsewhere.

He or she may have to pay a little more, travel a greater distance, and perhaps suffer some loss of educational quality, but these are questions of degree, not of getting shut out altogether.

As for job reservation, it has meaning only when there are jobs to reserve. The size of the central government has been static for over a decade, and the state governments have not grown much either.

Such jobs as exist are mostly as replacement "" and there are thousands of aspirants for every job that is going. That is partly because the government pays above market for low-level jobs (which are the overwhelming majority of all government jobs), thereby creating artificial demand.

When you throw in the added benefit that once you get the job, you don't have to do much work and that there is plenty of scope for illegal gratification, the pressure mounts.

There are two ways to tackle this. One is to reduce the attractiveness of working in low-level government jobs, but the unions and the periodic Pay Commissions will not allow this.

Another is to create better job opportunities elsewhere, so that a government job does not remain the prized commodity that it is today. This requires a change of many laws and mindsets, so that attention shifts from the fate of the protected high-wage islands to the surrounding sea of people in the unorganised labour market.

Again because of the unions, no government wants to do this. Having ruled out the obvious solutions, the Congress has taken the matter a dangerous step forward by planting the seed of a bad new idea: that job reservation be extended to the private sector.

Gujarat tried this but was stopped by the courts. Maharashtra is now running with the idea. It must be stopped before more damage is done. And politicians must address the issue of creating more jobs, not reserving the few that are available.