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’.