Adamantine in its obstinate refusal to fully liberalise and deregulate the Indian economy by consigning the socialist era licence permit-quota regime to the dustbin of history, the neta-babu brotherhood is endangering the unity of India. With unemployment ballooning across the country as the desultory rate of economic growth has been worsened by the Covid-19 induced national economic lockdown, several state governments have issued ordinances, notifications and enacted legislation to reserve 70- 75 percent of jobs for sons of the soil. Given that in 1956, the boundaries of the country’s 29 states were ill-advisedly redrawn on the basis of the language spoken by the majority in each state, in effect this means that government jobs will favour the linguistic majority of every state.

On August 19, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced that the state government is “making all legal provisions” for reserving 75 percent of all new government jobs for state residents. In July, the Haryana and Andhra Pradesh governments went a step further and vowed to impose similar quotas on private sector industry.

Apart from being unconstitutional because Article 19 (1) of the Constitution expressly confers fundamental rights upon every citizen to move freely and reside in any part of India to practice a trade, profession or occupation, such laws are generating tensions within state boundaries. Because over the past seven decades since independence, tens of millions of rural citizens from across the country have migrated to industrialised states such as Maharashtra, Karnataka and Delhi. The solution to rising unemployment in states is not reserved job quotas, but for the Central and state governments to get their acts together and attract domestic and foreign investment and double their rates of GDP growth to automatically increase employment. Mandating reserved quotas is perhaps the worst pathway towards full employment.

Moreover as any amateur economist will vouch, restricting mobility of labour, business professionals and capital within national borders is an invitation to inflation, low productivity and economic backwardness. It’s a fundamental tenet of economics that corporations and entrepreneurs must have freedom to freely marry labour and capital with best priced natural resources for the growth of national economies. In the circumstances, the nativism and parochialism being propagated and practised by a rising number of state politicians is regressive, anti-national and disruptive of national unity.

If they really care about the alarming spectre of unemployment staring the country’s youth in the face, state governments should smooth the path for the entry of capital and labour by slashing red tape and introducing single window, time-bound clearances for businessmen and entrepreneurs. Retreat into narrow parochialism will make a bad economic situation worse.

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