- Earlier Haryana government, under the pressure from Dushyant Chautala, enacted such a law reserving 75 per cent of the jobs that pay up to 30,000 rupees to the locals.
- The first bill to provide reservations to locals in private-sector jobs was brought by the TRS ruled Telangana in 2017.
- TRS brought a bill to reserve 62 per cent of the jobs for locals, but it was limited to public employment.
- Channi took this madness to another level with the announcement that all the jobs will be reserved for the locals.
In the last few years, a vicious cycle of providing job reservations or quotas to locals in public as well as private jobs have been started by some state governments. The latest state government to fall for it is Congress-led Punjab. The government led by Charanjit Singh Channi has gone to the extreme of this madness and said that 100 per cent of jobs in Punjab (private and public) will be reserved for Punjabis. “We want youth of Punjab only to get placements in the state. For this, we will bring a new law within a week,” he told reporters.
Earlier Haryana government, under the pressure from Dushyant Chautala, enacted such a law reserving 75 per cent of the jobs that pay up to 30,000 rupees to the locals.
Until Amarinder Singh was CM, the temptation to start the same madness in the neighbouring state was resisted, but with Channi, the chauvinists are getting a better hold of the policies.
“When we advertise a job, 25% [applicants] end up coming from Haryana, 15% from Himachal Pradesh, some come from Delhi,” Channi told The Tribune in an interview. “No space is left for Punjabis.”He added, “I am bringing in a law to ensure that Punjabis get 100% jobs in Punjab, especially government jobs. I am consulting lawyers.”
The first bill to provide reservations to locals in private-sector jobs was brought by the TRS ruled Telangana in 2017. TRS brought a bill to reserve 62 per cent of the jobs for locals, but it was limited to public employment.
After that, Congress-ruled Karnataka extended the idea for the jobs in the private sector with 100% reservation for locals in the blue-collar jobs bill. Although, the bill was never passed in the assembly and the city of Bengaluru was saved. In 2019, the newly elected Jaganmohan Reddy government also brought a bill to reserve 75 per cent of the private as well as public jobs to locals.
Given the populist nature of Indian politics where every leader plays the appeasement card without considering the harm to the economy, Maharashtra and Rajasthan also rushed for it although the percentage was much lower and restricted to public employment.
So far, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, West Bengal, Gujarat, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Karnataka have enacted legislations reserving some percentage of private and public jobs to the locals.
Channi took this madness to another level with the announcement that all the jobs will be reserved for the locals. Now one has no idea how the agriculture of Punjab, which is completely dependent on labourers from states like UP, Bihar, and Jharkhand (and their farmers protest against the farm bills even though they are more of landlords than farmers), will survive.
Such policies of the reservation will compel entrepreneurs and industries to look for employees within the state and it places an extra burden on companies to become inward-looking. It must be borne in mind that in today’s era, industries cannot survive with unskilled or manual labour. This, by extension, means that the industries might not be able to practically access the vast demographic dividend of India consisting of technically skilled and qualified individuals, which would in turn directly affect the level of industrial growth and investments.
