August 31, 2004 ☼ Public Policy
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
If Manmohan Singh’s government had left private-sector job reservations as one unkept electoral promise, he would have done the nation a great service. But by taking the initial steps towards polluting the private sector with the politics of entitlement, the UPA government has risked setting in motion an unstoppable political juggernaut that would only result in the evisceration of the Indian economy. In the global context, corporate India may not even get that one silver medal, even as China comes closes to overtaking America’s medals tally.
Affirmative action may have its advantages, but in India the system of job-reservations in the government sector has led to the perversion of the original objectives of such a policy and worse, entrenched divisions based on castes and communities. We thus have the farcical spectacle of more communities clamouring to be declared backward every year. While this may be exactly what the vote-bank politicians want, it has left citizens divided, polarised and resentful of other communities. The transplantation of this perverse policy onto the private sector would probably rival Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward that brought China’s economy down to its knees in the 1960s.
To even have considered a job-reservation policy for the private sector was idiocy. Trying to put it into practice would be sheer lunacy.
Update:
Reservations are probably the first step in the long process that breaks a person’s innocence and idealism. The student comes away with the dull realisation that the “system” isn’t fair and he may conclude that it will never be.[Spontaneous Order]
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