Govt decides: OBC quota law coming, seats will be hiked

The decision, announced after a UPA-Left coordination committee meeting, backed by across-the-board political consensus brushes aside the National Knowledge Commission’s objections.

Apart from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, the meeting was attended by Pranab Mukherjee, P Chidambaram, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Sharad Pawar, Arjun Singh, Shivraj Patil, Ram Vilas Paswan and Jaipal Reddy. The Left leaders who attended included the CPM’s Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury, CPI’s A B Bardhan and D Raja, RSP’s Abani Roy and Forward Bloc’s Debabrata Biswas.

After the meeting, Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee said that while the “Oversight Committee” would be at the helm, smaller groups comprising deans, directors and vice-chancellors of institutions concerned would work out details of implementation for each class of institution.

“The Oversight Committee will put together the recommendations of these groups and submit a comprehensive report by August 31,” Mukherjee said.

Sources said that the decision to bring in the legislation was unanimous as was the one to raise the number of seats in institutions, evidently keeping in view anxieties of students from other categories.

Apart from the Left parties that have strongly advocated the immediate implementation of the reservation policy, key UPA partners, the PMK and DMK, were among those pressing for a reservation policy.

Discussion on the reservation issue took much of the time during the meeting when Cabinet ministers made presentations and took questions. In the morning, even though HRD Minister Arjun Singh was yet to make his presentation, the reservation issue cropped up. One suggestion was to bring in an ordinance to implement the OBC quota.

The argument was that increasing seats in educational institutions and creating the necessary infrastructure for them would take time and it was imperative there was no delay in implementing reservations.

The BJP regards the provision on reservation to be an enabling legislation and considers the proposals, made earlier, for increasing the overall seats to be a good step. However, its position has been that any decision on this should be supported by all parties.