A Truly Anti-India Toolkit

Context: Job quotas for locals make disastrous economic and federal sense.

Recent thrust towards creating Job quotas for locals

• Haryana State Employment of Local Candidates Act, 2020: Reserves 75% new jobs in private companies with a salary below ?50,000 a month for local candidates for a period of 10 years.’
  • This legislation is on account of 26.4% unemployment rate in Haryana (well above the national average of 6.9%) – as per Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) data.
• Jharkhand planning to notify its own ‘local quota’ policy.
• Political parties promising job quotas for locals in their manifestos.

Arguments against reserving Jobs to locals

• Flawed argument of outsiders stealing the jobs: According to the 2011 census, majority of migration is intra-state and interstate migrants in the urban workforce in 2001-11 formed an average of 8%.
• Disastrous economic sense: It will blunt competitiveness and kill skill availability. 
  • Such laws will not only impact construction workers and unskilled workers but also nurses, healthcare workers, teachers and white collar employees in the private sector.
  • Employer will suffer: Allowing the criterion of geographical location to supersede merit and skill demolishes enterprise and anything remotely associated with quality.
• Disastrous Federal sense: It will undo the good work done to encourage migration: E.g. ‘One Nation, One Ration Card’, implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) etc.
• Against the spirit of constitution: To bolster equality of law irrespective of place of birth (Article 14), against discrimination in (public) employment (Article 15), and free movement to all Indian citizens across India (Article 19). 
• Goes against Judicial pronouncements: In ‘Charu Khurana vs Union of India’ case. in which a trade union debarred a worker as she had not lived in Maharashtra for ‘at least five years’.

Alternatives to reserving Jobs to locals

• Encourage locals to become the ‘go-to’ workforce: Thus companies will rush in to hire them without the need for localisation laws.
• Foster an alternative kind of localisation: Encourage local enterprises to apply nativism to have schools, medical centres, entertainment centres and libraries that will foster a genuinely able local workforce, in conjunction with constant skill transfer from ‘outside’.