Will the fat lady sing?

If newspaper reports of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's meeting with representatives of CII-Assocham on their affirmative action report are to be believed, the immediate crisis in terms of the threat to implement a law requiring private sector firms to reserve jobs along caste lines may have blown over. The statements attributed to the Prime Minister certainly suggest that, and the ministers known to be in favour of private sector job quotas have not dismissed the CII-Assocham plan as eyewash, which is an encouraging sign. The related problem, of pressure to increase reservation in educational institutions, may also have been staved off for the time being with the Veerappa Moily Oversight Committee submitting its interim report to the Prime Minister as well as to the human resource development ministry""the panel has reportedly recommended that institutions be allowed to expand their student base (only after this can reservations be extended) at their own pace, without lowering standards, and asked for a huge step-up in government expenditure on education (at Rs 20,000 crore, it is nearly five times the 10th Plan allocation for higher education).

But since the ways of the government are not something you bet your shirt on, the question of whether the reservations ghost has been exorcised will depend upon whether the Congress party chief thinks the government's social change agenda is complete or not, and whether there is electoral mileage to be gained by forcing the issue. Depending on the conclusions reached, there is still the danger that holes will be picked in the CII-Assocham proposal""and doing that will not be a difficult task. Industry, for instance, has made much of its plan to mentor 100 Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe entrepreneurs every year, and to provide coaching to 10,000 students from the same categories in the first year, going up to 50,000 by 2009. From the perspective of organised private sector industry (whose total employment is only a few million), these are substantial numbers to commit to. But from the national perspective, when 28 per cent of the population belongs to the SC/ST category, the numbers are very small. But that in a way points to the fallacy in approaching the employment issue from the perspective of organised industry. Nor does the proposal address the question of job reservations for the Other Backward Castes, which is where the current controversy began.

The other question is whether there are any penalties if industry fails to deliver what it promises. The answer is probably none, since the entire exercise is semi-voluntary. Given that the other industry chamber, Ficci, has already said the government will first have to ensure there is adequate bank credit for such SC/ST entrepreneurs, it is entirely likely that industry will cite government inaction to justify its own failure to deliver on various fronts. None of which is to say that it is industry's responsibility, or failure, to fix the problem of economic and social backwardness. Indeed, it has been this newspaper's view that the government has to solve the problem, and this can be done only by ensuring larger participation of SC/ST/OBC children at the school stage, not by reservations in colleges or in jobs. Hard data from the National Sample Survey make this crystal clear. But if industry is not in a position to openly challenge the government's attempt to foist its social agenda on industry's shoulders, and hopes to gain time by promising such action as it feels capable of committing to (like publishing the number of SC/ST employees in a company's annual report), this is a game that can service only a limited time objective. After that, the issue will return.