Job reservation in private sector: Besides Haryana, at least six states have either enacted or considering legislation

Though reservation in jobs has been a vexatious and much debated issue in India, a few states are moving towards reservation of jobs for locals.

The Haryana Governor has accorded consent to a piece of legislation passed by the assembly last year stipulating 75% of private sector jobs with gross salary up to Rs 50,000 a month for the people of the state.

The law is known as Haryana State Employment of Local Candidates Bill against which companies have started arguing on the ground that it will impede meritocracy that the private sector seeks to establish.

However, Haryana is not the first party announce reservation for private sector.

Andhra Pradesh has already enacted a law while Maharashtra has said it will make a legislation to this end. Sikkim had made a law that was rejected by the President. Deliberations took place in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan about the feasibility of such reservation.

In November 2019, the YS Jaganmohan Reddy government pushed through Andhra Pradesh Employment of Local Candidates in the Industries/Factories Bill 2019 to ensure 75% of locals got jobs in existing and upcoming industries. The Act also laid down a cut off date of three years for the units from the commencement of the legislation.

Justifying the Act, labour employment training anf factories minister Gummanur Jayaram had said, “Since most of the land requirement is met by acquiring private agricultural lands, the owners are being displaced and3 deprived of their livelihood. Therefore there is a demand from land losers, apart from local population to provide employment.”

The Andhra Pradesh government officials also said that the law was necessary since it was noticed that managements of industries did not keep their word to provide jobs to the locals.

Just before COVID-19 triggered the lockdown, the Uddhav Thackeray government in Maharashtra announced that it planned a legislation that would force the private sector to reserve 80% of the jobs for people who have lived in the state for 15 years or more.

The government’s resolve was announced in the legislative by industries minister Subhash Desai that though the administration had asked the industry to do so, companies were not following it.

“We will bring in a comprehensive law to address this,” said had said.

In September 2018 chief minister of Gujarat, Vijay Rupani, said that they were mulling a law to reserve 80% of the jobs for Gujaratis. He also said the government was trying to fine tune the definition of domicile for the purpose.

In September 2019 Ashok Gehlot, the chief minister of Rajasthan said that his government was deliberating 75% reservation in private industries for local residents.

In 2010, the Pawan Chamling government of Sikkim pushed through a legislation for 90% quota for locals in private sector but the legislation (Local Employment Protection Bill 2010) was thrown out by President Pranab Mukherjee.

Madhya Pradesh also came close to such a legislation when in 2019 chief minister Kamal Nath had said on the floor of the state assembly that his government was mulling a law to reserve 70% of the jobs in the private sector for residents of the state.

Significantly, Jananayak Janata Party of Haryana had the private sector reservation as its principal election promise in 2019. The leader of the party Dushyant Chautala is the deputy chief minister of the state.

The seeds of reservation of jobs in the private sector were first sowed during the UPA-I regime when inclusiveness and social equity received a lot of attention.

Former Tata Steel Managing Director JJ Irani headed a five-member committee drawn from CII and Assocham to prepare a report to suggest ways of helping backward classes get jobs in the private sector without the government pushing any legislation in this area.

The committee, whose members included Anil Agarwal of Vedanta Resources, R Seshasayee of Ashok Leyland, Sunil Munjal of Hero Honda and Subodh Bhargava, a past president of CII, submitted its report to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in July 2006 but no concrete action followed.

In 2013, the year before it lost the general elections, Meira Kumar, the minister for social justice and empowerment in UPA II government said that they were planning to go ahead with reservation of jobs for backward classes in the private sector.

She had said at that time that a group of ministers had submitted their report and the government was considering the possibility of introducing a Bill in this regard.