Jats occupy more jobs than population share

Sushil Manav

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 16

The caste data of government employees released by the Haryana Backward Classes Commission (HBCC) show that it will be very difficult for the state government to provide reservation to the dominant Jat community in Haryana.

The data show that while Jats occupy 28.28 per cent of state government jobs against their population share of 25 per cent, Jat Sikhs, Mullah and Muslim Jats, Rors and Tyagis for whom the quota leaders have been demanding reservation in government jobs and educational institutions already have a share of 31.35 per cent.

The report shows that the Backward Classes (A) have a share of 14.57 per cent, BC (B) 12.05 per cent, Scheduled Castes 20.99 per cent and other castes, which do not have any type of reservation, occupy 21.04 per cent government jobs in Haryana.

The share of Jats in Class-I jobs is 24.48 per cent, Class-II 30.22 per cent, Class-III 31.08 per cent and in Class-IV 14.12 per cent.

Based on the ruling of the Punjab and Haryana High Court on the issue of reservation for Jats, the HBCC had sought information from the government on caste-based data of its employees from Class 1 to IV latest by November 30.

For collecting the data, the government had withdrawn a 55-year-old official order that barred using “religion and caste” of employees in official records and had instructed all its employees to update their caste data on the Human Resources Management System (HRMS) portal.

The government first supplied the data on November 30, but the commission returned it for not being “quantifiable”. Now, the caste-wise data supplied by the government on December 14 was uploaded on the HBCC website yesterday. People have been asked to file their objections to the data by December 30.

Based on the data, the HBCC is to submit a report by March 31, 2018, to the government, which will then take a decision on the reservation issue.

Sources say with data in place, the government may find it very difficult to announce quota for Jats that will be liable to legal scrutiny.

A senior bureaucrat said that the whole saga of reservation in the state had political overtones and the government had used it to garner votes. The issue had already damaged the close-knit social fabric of society.

Yashpal Malik, president of the All India Jat Arakashan Sangharsh Samiti (AIJASS), said the data are misleading since it did not reflect the social and educational status of Jats and also they did not reveal jobs given after 1993 when the reservation to OBCs was started.

Hawa Singh Sangwan, president of a parallel faction of the AIJASS, said, “Our demand was for quota in Central government jobs, but we had to demand reservation in Haryana because of a law enacted in 2011 that made quota in the state a pre-condition for the same in the Central jobs.”