BackCan increasing job reservations solve India’s employment crisis?
Has a section of India's political class confused reservations as a way to address the growing employment generation challenge?
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New Delhi: From Gujarat to Haryana, agitations demanding job reservations continue to test the government. This is nothing new. The previous United Progressive Alliance government also had its share of sleepless nights from agitations, including that of Gujjars demanding scheduled tribe (ST) status. It had also faced flak from Muslims for failing to implement the recommendations of panels such as the Ranganath Misra Commission, which called for giving reservations to religious minorities. With the legal debate on the validity of reservations for scheduled castes (SCs), STs and other backward classes (OBCs) already settled, reservation politics is shifting to demand for including more groups in these categories. A look at related statistics suggests that the conflict might be far from over.
Since reservations only apply for government jobs, the first question is how many such jobs exist in India.
The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) database gives a figure of 17.6 million public sector jobs for 2011-12. This includes all organized sector jobs in the central government, state governments, quasi-governmental and local bodies. With a rollback in the scope of state activities after economic reforms, the number of public sector jobs first stagnated and then started declining. In fact, the bulk of organized sector employment has been generated in the private sector in the recent past in India.
To be sure, the decline in the number of public sector jobs does not mean that there is no government recruitment whatsoever. For instance, a lot of people might be retiring every year and their numbers just being replaced.
According to the Seventh Pay Commission report, there were 857,000 recruitments in various departments and ministries of the central government between 2006 and 2014. This gives us a figure of slightly more than 100,000 jobs being added every year. It should be noted these are only central government jobs. Assuming the same hiring rates for state governments—whose stock of jobs was 1.6 times that of the centre’s—the total addition to overall government jobs would be less than 300,000 a year.
At the same time, India is churning out graduates by the millions. Slowly but steadily, the number of persons with higher education entering India’s job market has been increasing.
According to World Bank data, the share of workers with tertiary level education in India’s labour force doubled from 4.9% to 9.8% between 1994 and 2010. The rise in the share of graduates is evident across all caste groups, National Sample Survey (NSS) data shows.
Consider this: In the two years to 2011-12, NSS data showed that the graduate population (including higher degrees) increased by around 10 million. Of this, around 50%, or 5 million people, were those who were classified as OBC.
Thus, we have a situation where the number of government jobs—even under the most generous of assumptions—would be just a fraction of the number of people graduating every year. Given this huge mismatch, reservations are unlikely to provide employment to even a small fraction of socially deprived category job seekers.
To be sure, there is evidence to show that reservations, especially in education are still desirable in India, an earlier Plain Facts story argued.
The question that needs to be asked is whether a section of the political class in India has confused reservations as a way to address the growing employment generation challenge instead of them serving as a tool to correct skewed access to opportunities.
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