Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal, a newsletter on Indian politics. Have feedback, interesting links or memes? Send to shoaib@scr...
Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal, a newsletter on Indian politics. Have feedback, interesting links or memes? Send to shoaib@scroll.in.
India has had, since colonial times, reservations on the basis of caste and community. However, the past few years is seeing the rise of a new sort of quota: one based on citizenship of the states that make up the Indian Union.
On November 6, Haryana notified a drastic law that reserves as many as 75% of all private sector jobs paying up to Rs 30,000 per month for Haryanvis. Not only that, 10% of the workforce will have to be taken from the district that the firm is located in.
Expectedly, the policy move was widely condemned in India’s English-language press, which saw in it, quite correctly, a drastic trend of walling of states from each other. An editorial in the Indian Express argued that the law “could end up eroding the state’s attractiveness as an investment destination, hurting its economic interests in the long run”. An opinion column in the Business Standard argued that the move would lead to an “exit of capital from Gurgaon”.
However, what was largely missed in this was an attempt to understand why Haryana had undertaken such a drastic move, especially when the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government...
