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Avoid tinkering with quotas

Community-based reservations can also raise their head again, which means we would be inviting social unrest.

Under pressure from a hawkish agitation by the Patidar community, the Gujarat government has promised to notify an ordinance on May 1 to keep 10 per cent reservation for the Economically Backward Classes, which will be besides the 48 per cent reservation in place for SCs/STs, OBCs, etc. Intriguing as the idea is that 70 years after Independence we should be looking at economic criteria (below Rs 6 lakh per annum in the case of Gujarat) also for affirmative action, it would still open a Pandora’s box.

The constitutional legality of such reservation would also be subject to judicial review, particularly since the total reservation would cross the 50 per cent limit thought to be in place after a SC ruling in 1992 in the Mandal judgment. Of course, there are exceptions, like the 69 per cent reservation in education and government jobs in Tamil Nadu through the Tamil Nadu Backward Classes, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes Act, 1993, which had skirted judicial review as it was enacted under the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution.

The point to ponder is not just that economic hardship should be considered too but that by extending reservations the door will be opened for so many agitations by pressure groups — for instance, the Jats in Haryana — that we should fear a reverse backlash of the Mandal effect wherein the backward classes can claim any additional reservation should be for them and not the forward classes.

Community-based reservations can also raise their head again, which means we would be inviting social unrest. The clamour for quotas is never going to die, but tinkering any further with existing reservations is an exercise best avoided.

( Source : Deccan Chronicle. )
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