Job reservation for locals: DMK makes the promise; might be a low hanging fruit for Mamata Banerjee too
Trinamool Congress is locked in a do-or-die battle with BJP and jobs for locals not only fits its nativist stance but also the compulsions of fiscal stress
Last week DMK leader MK Stalin released the party’s manifesto and announced that if voted to power they would reserve 75% of the private sector jobs in the state for locals, a move that is gaining ground in different states such as Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Maharashtra. While India Inc has generally baulked at the idea and argued that it goes against the concept of meritocracy and might sacrifice efficiency, there is no sign yet that the political class is going to be reined in.
A pertinent question that arises at this hour is, would Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee toe the line of Stalin?
In short, it sounds very attractive for her to adopt this line to raise her party more acceptable in the face of the rumblings of anti-incumbency and the full-throated no-holds-barred campaign that BJP has unleashed against her.
The TMC chief is pitted in a do-or-die battle with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that has deployed its entire might to unseat her from the state. The saffron party has always been a marginal player in the state till the 2019 Lok Sabha elections when it grabbed 18 of the 42 seats and 40.64% vote share.
The muscle of the ruling party at the Centre has triggered a small exodus from TMC to the BJP and it is clear that the upcoming elections is the biggest challenge that 66-year-old Mamata Banerjee has faced in her political career so far.
Faced with the saffron firepower, the options before the TMC supremo are limited.
Ever since she came in power in May 2011, Mamata Banerjee made populism her mantra. Her government has implemented welfare schemes, or sops, that are targeted almost at every section of the society, covering them, in her famous words, “from the cradle to the grave”.
There are schemes for the girl child, schemes to gift cycles, books, dress and shoes for school students, schemes for women pursuing college and university-level education and not get married, for the unemployed youth, old age pension, health insurance and income support schemes for the farmers.
The state government has also sector specific assistance schemes for rural craftsmen and artists going.
All these schemes reduce the scope of TMC deepening their benefits and/or extending them to cover new segments of the population. In any case, there is hardly any surprise element in extending similar sops to new sectors.
The government also does not have much room for increasing the limit of reservation in government jobs for two reasons. One, in July 2019, Bengal became the fourth state after Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Telangana to reserve more than 50% government jobs for different weak sections of the population. Two, the number of government jobs are not rising fast to make it an attractive proposition for the electorate.
Moreover, Bengal suffers from such fiscal stress that any sop or reservation that the government might become an unsustainable burden.
Take a few examples from the budget of 2021-22 presented by the chief minister in February. The state is supposed to spend Rs 63,700 crore alone on debt repayment which will consume 84.46% of the state’s own tax revenue. The expenditure under the three heads of debt servicing, salary and pension amounts to Rs 144,128 crore which consumes 74.27% of the state’s revenue receipts leaving very little money for development work.
In this scenario, it makes sense for Mamata Banerjee to search for benefits for the electorate that would not put the government’s finance under strain.
Reservation of jobs in the private sector, therefore, becomes a low hanging fruit for the TMC supremo.
She can also draw comfort from the fact that states with high levels on industrialisation are also moving along these lines. According to latest available data, in 2017-18 Tamil Nadu accounted for 15.89% factories of the country and Maharashtra 11.10%.
In March 2020, Maharashtra industry minister Subhash Desai announced in the legislative council that the government would bring a comprehensive law to reserve 80% of the jobs for the locals.
In July 2019, Andhra Pradesh became the first state to legislate reservation of 75% private sector jobs for locals.
Haryana, a state much smaller than West Bengal, which has recently legislated 75% reservation of jobs in the private sector for locals, also accounted for 3.74% of the nation’s factories in 2017-18.
Speculation is rife that Jharkhand, a neighbouring state of Bengal, is also set to announce 75% reservation for locals.
Since her agitation forced Ratan Tata to withdraw and dismantle a near-complete Nano factory in Singur, the TMC chief has been consistently accused of an anti-investor image that would not go away despite her efforts to organise investor summits every year and announce investment proposals of more than Rs 12 lakh crore over the past few years.
But the precedence of the other industry-rich states makes the situation less uncomfortable for Mamata Banerjee to think of such a policy. The adoption of the policy in Haryana also ensures that BJP won’t be able to criticise her for adopting an anti-industry step.
Over the past few months, Mamata Banerjee has increasingly adopted a stance that can be described as ‘Bengalis first’ or ‘locals first’. She has also argued that BJP represents a culture that is alien to Bengal and described herself as the one who can protect the identity of the Bengalis.
She has also famously called BJP as a party of “outsiders” in the state.
Advocating reservation for Bengalis and domiciled citizens is not at variance with this nativist stance of the TMC leader.