Quotas solve little reservations have morphed into a populist exercise to deal with a jobs crisis this will not help

Quotas solve little reservations have morphed into a populist exercise to deal with a jobs crisis this will not help

The Lok Sabha was adjourned sine die on Wednesday, the outcome of an unproductive monsoon session. Well, not quite. On August 10, in an extraordinary show of unanimity, the Constitution (127th Amendment) Bill was passed. Everyone was in favour of it. That’s because if there is one subject that can persuade all the political parties to make common cause, it’s reservations. The bill’s aim is to negate the outcome of a Supreme Court judgment in May which said that only GoI can identify OBC groups to benefit from reservation. All political parties agree that states too should have the right to pick beneficiaries.

Debates swirling around reservations, particularly for OBCs, are the focal point of the failures of Indian politics. What started off as affirmative action to level the playing field has morphed into a populist exercise that no political party can resist. Consequences may be grave as the contemporary push to expand reservations are misguided attempts to solve India’s problem of a jobs crisis. Consider the data. Even as the drive for expanding the reserved share of jobs – be it on the basis of caste, economic vulnerability or domicile – grows, the number of jobs are shrinking. GoI data shows that in 2012, 79 ministries collectively employed 3 million people. By 2020, the number had shrunk to 1.8 million. As a consequence, the absolute number of jobs held by every category declined.

The story is no different in the private sector. India’s youth population increased by about 72 million between 2004-05 and 2018-19. During the same period, young Indians in active work declined by about 25 million to an aggregate 138 million. As the young left agriculture, the other sectors were unable to create enough jobs. This is the backdrop to which the political response has been to find economic answers through the prism of identity.

The outcome of this populism is a weakening of the idea of common citizenship. Opportunities will be determined by identity and individual rights will be relegated. A related problem is this is a route without an end in sight. Relegating individual effort to group identity spawns narrower and narrower ways of looking at the world. Thus, the political backing for sub-categorisation of OBCs and SCs – since there will always be a group that believes it’s been unfairly treated. A nation is greater than the sum of its parts. India’s political class is forgetting it.