Corporates and Their Systemic ‘Innocence’

The Haryana government’s legislation to reserve 75% jobs for locals raises more questions than it answers. What is the methodology that the government has adopted to come to this figure? Also, the category of locals that the government has used as the grounds to provide for the quota in the private sectors is rather ambiguous. After all, any reservation package, if accepted and implemented, cannot be carried out to its logical end with such an amorphous category as local. In actual implementation of such legislations, it is always the individual who is taken up as the concrete unit to distribute the benefits of reservation. The individual is primarily abstracted from class, caste, gender, religion, etc. It is the social background rather than the place of origin that weighs decisively while selecting a candidate. In such a scenario, a local acquires only a symbolic value. If the legislation suffers from these limitations, then why has the Government of Haryana pushed the quota through a legislation without giving due consideration to the issues raised above? Is it because the government in question averts the legitimation crisis produced by the farmers’ protests against the three farm bills? However, since the Government of Haryana has suggested a quota for the private sector, it would be important to discuss the grounds on which the corporates seek to oppose the legislation. And what is the nature of this opposition?

The corporates, as reported in the media, have been using the usual stock argument that quotas in general are inimical to industrial development, capital investment and merit that is to be accrued from open competition. Apart from the generic arguments against the quota policy, the corporates seem to have two more arguments.