In Douglas Adams’s SF masterpiece The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, the supercomputer Deep Thought, built by a group of hyper-intelligent pan-galactic aliens, deduces, after seven-and-a-half-million years of cogitation, that the answer to the ultimate question about ‘life, the universe and everything’ was 42. When pointed out that the answer was meaningless, Deep Thought responds that it was meaningless only because one didn’t know what the actual question was. Our politicians, are, as usual, several steps ahead of any supercomputer, at least when it comes to coming up with answers to seemingly unsolvable questions. They have a single, simple, “one size fits all” solution to every problem that our country faces, either at the integrated national level or the disaggregated state or local level. That solution, of course, is law-making. We have a law for every problem that besets us. Our so-called ‘demographic dividend’ has turned out to be a demographic disaster, with our chronically underfunded, understaffed and under-skilled public education system simply unable to provide the kind of basic skills required to make the millions of youth joining the workforce every year employable in any kind of job requiring something more than mere muscle power, and the small, high quality private education system accessible to only a tiny fraction of the creamy layer? Worry not, we shall legislate a solution for it. So we have the Right to Education Act, which rammed the aforesaid private education system to step into the breach created by the government education system. Never mind the fact that the demand-supply equation is so badly skewed that only a tiny fraction of those who need it can actually access better quality education using their RTE entitlement. On paper, the problem has been solved, because we have given the right to education to everyone! What about hunger, malnutrition and chronic under-nutrition, you ask? Never mind that India ranked 101 out of 116 countries in the 2021 Global Hunger Index and that its GHI score (based on the values for four indicators — undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting and child mortality) was 27.5, considered “alarming”. Officially, according to a recent government submission in a PIL being heard by the Supreme Court, “no state or UT has reported any hunger death for the past few years”. If it is not officially recorded by some babu somewhere, it doesn’t exist, right? Besides, we have a Right to Food Act which anyway has outlawed hunger, since everyone now has a fundamental right to food!
Rural employment
So it is hardly surprising that our politicians have tried to take the legislative route to solve that other spectre blighting the lustrousness of the India growth story — joblessness. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is one such attempt, guaranteeing a certain minimum number of days of employment every year, paying at least the minimum wage, to anyone seeking work.
To its credit, this is not some pie in the sky type of legislation where persons or entities unknown have to actually provide the ‘right’ enshrined in law. Here, the scheme is run by the government and is only limited by the amount of funds set aside for this. So, while on paper, any able bodied bona fide resident of rural India can demand employment under NREGA, he/she will get it in actuality only if the funds exist to pay the necessary wages. Not so the kind of job reservation laws passed by states like Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh and Odisha, in a bid to address the chronic unemployment problem in their states. Since the state or local governments have neither the money nor the capacity to create the number of jobs needed, it was much simpler for them to “solve” the problem of creating jobs for local youth by imposing birth or domicile-based quotas (quite apart from caste and other quotas) on private sector jobs in one form or the other. Gujarat, in fact, has a law which imposes an 85 per cent quota on jobs for locals in companies which had availed of any kind of government incentive or subsidy.
Haryana’s move
Haryana has become the latest state to join this list. On January 15, the Haryana State Employment of Local Candidates Act, 2020 (HSELC Act), passed early last year, was formally notified. From that date onwards, three out of four hires made by any private entity operating in the state will have to be made from “local” candidates with domicile status in the state. There are some provisos — new IT/ITeS start-ups which are to commence operations by 2024 will get a two-year exemption, and the quotas apply only to jobs paying ₹30,000 per month or less as wages. But the damage has been done. Even the ₹30,000 cut-off will cover a huge number of employees in the IT/BPO sector as well as the state’s biggest employer, the automobile manufacturing sector. The BJP government is seemingly unconcerned about the chaos this will unleash on the state’s IT/BPO sector, which accounts for 10 per cent of its GDP and 18 per cent of employment, or the automobile sector, which accounts for one out of three cars and six out of 10 motorbikes made in the country! It has a more immediate problem on hand — an unemployment rate of over 34 per cent, the highest in the country according to CMIE data as of December 2021. Given the boom in the IT/BPO, automobile, real estate and retailing sectors in Haryana, lack of jobs is not the real problem in Haryana — lack of employability of local youth clearly is, which is why so many “outsiders” are filling all those jobs.
It is far simpler to pass a law and claim to have fixed the problem rather than actually take the long and hard road of improving education and skilling infrastructure so that the said local candidates become natural choices for selection, rather than relying on a birth certificate or ration card to get a job. But that’s not as easy a sell during elections as saying “we made employers give jobs to our youth”. As long as the electoral brownie points can be scored, why bother whether your legislated solution actually solves anything, or is even legal or constitutional in the first place?
The writer is a senior journalist