A few hours can make a world of difference to the life of a bill. The Karnataka state employment of local candidates in the industries, factories and other establishments bill, which sought to reserve a wide range of jobs in the private sector only for Kannadigas, had received the nod of the Congress cabinet, only to be put on hold within hours on account of a major backlash from the leaders of industry as well as from Nasscom, India’s apex technological body. The outburst is legitimate. Among other troubling provisions, the bill seeks to reserve 50% of managerial jobs, 75% of non-management employment, and 100% of unskilled jobs for those who have either been born in Karnataka or have lived in that state for 15 years, can speak, read and write in Kannada, and succeed in a yet-to-be-announced eligibility test conducted by a nodal agency. The quota, the bill says, would be applicable not only to the information technology and IT-enabled sectors but also to clerical, contractual and casual labour. Karnataka is not the first state to experiment with such regressive measures. Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Haryana had unveiled similar legislations. The Punjab and Haryana High Court had struck down Haryana’s myopic adventurism by describing the step as patently discriminatory. The laws passed by Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand have also met with stiff legal challenges.
What propels such misdirected, selective welfarism is, of course, one of the principal banes of Indian politics — unabashed populism. It is the pursuit of such retrograde populism by political dispensations of all hues that makes elected governments shut their eyes to the crossing of ethical red lines. But unambiguous partisanship — equality is a constitutionally protected principle — is not the only issue here. Governments have a poor record when it comes to the generation of employment in this country. This puts the onus of job-creation disproportionately on the private sector. Saddling the private sector with laws that are more than likely to adversely affect its efficiency, productivity and employment-generation capacity cannot be cited as an instance of prudence. Yet the Congress government in Karnataka seems to be inclined to commit these very lapses in return for what it is hoping would be electoral dividends. Additionally, the imposition of the quota raj could lead to the worsening of red-tapeism, corruption and nepotism with bureaucrats serving as the empowered constituency to oversee the execution of the rules on the ground. There is no point in the Karnataka government deliberating on such a problematic bill. It should bin it.