Qualify those quotas

Constitution. Similarly, the government took 44 years to identify OBCs and implement reservations for them.

If the government is truly sincere about opening up employment opportunities to the socially oppressed, it must first review the existing policy of reservation and come out with a white paper on the present status of reservation. Such a document must detail how many jobs were identified for reservation in all the sectors, how many jobs have been filled and how many vacancies remain. It should look into the causes of omission and commission and help plug the gaps. Further, if the government is convinced that reservations can uplift dalits, it should look into whether the presence of dalits and OBCs has increased in key sectors like the judiciary, army, vidhan parishads, Rajya Sabha and various regulatory bodies in different sectors.

Today, instead of doing this, the government has raised the issue of reservations in the private sector without any evidence of preparedness. For instance, the government has not analysed whether the private sector should be called a private sector at all, especially in the light of the types of concessions given to it by the government — like land and its registration at concessional rates, tax holidays, bank loans, besides the indirect contribution made by government in their development in the form of maintaining law and order, supply of technology, research and development, trained human resources, road, rail and air and communication facilities, etc. Has the government documented the total cost of these subsidies? Had they done so, it would have been easier for the government to show the real worth of the private sector.

Further, the government has also failed to critically evaluate the performance of the private sector in terms of its inefficiency, and so on. For instance, we should know the number of industries which die out every year or which declare themselves bankrupt. The government should also prepare a document on the concept of merit and qualification because as soon as the debate on reservation starts, the entire dalit community is portrayed as being devoid of any merit. The government should, in fact, seek responses from the intelligentsia — particularly the dalit intelligentsia — to explode the myth of merit once and for all. What, for instance, does merit have to to with clandestine recruitment patterns where “social connections” come into play?

Except for the judiciary, there is today no enforcing authority in India for reservations and hence violators of the policy — including the government itself and public sector undertakings — go unpunished. Given the track record of the private sector, especially in matters of labour law violations, the government has not come out with a plan on who the enforcing authority should be and what the punishment should be. Take, for instance, the allotment of dealerships to dalits within the broader rubric of affirmative action. It is a welcome step but has the government an effective mechanism to ascertain who the ‘real’ dalit is? Because experience shows that targeted beneficiaries often do not reap the benefits — other, more powerful lobbies do. Therefore unless the government debates, highlights and discusses the aforesaid issues, the general masses and dalits will not be able to formulate informed views on the entire issue. And in that case, the rhetoric on reservation in the private sector will remain just a political gimmick devoid of social and economic content.

In other words, in that case it will just be a ploy to garner dalit votes at election time, and to free the private sector of any meaningful social commitment.