372. Before parting with the subject I may say that the successive Governments, whether in the States or at the Centre, have been remiss in the discharge of their obligations, under the Constitution, towards the poor and backward people of the country. Job-reservations as a dole has been the vote-catching platter. Neither the job-reservations nor the reservation of seats in the educational institutions are of material help. Unless illiteracy and poverty are removed, the backward classes cannot be benefitted by the reservations alone. Affirmative-Action Programme on war footing is needed to uplift the backwards. Liberal grants and subsidised schemes under Article 340 read with Articles 15(4) and 46 are needed to remove illiteracy and poverty. Housing, sanitation and other necessities of life are to be provided. Illiteracy is the root cause of backwardness. “Free and compulsory education” is nowhere within reach even 45 years after the independence. The legislations enabling free education are only on paper. A poor father, whose child is earning and contributing towards the family income, may not send the child to school even if the education is free. The State may consider compensating the father for the loss in income due to child’s stopping work for going to school. It is not for this Court to suggest what the Government should do, we only say that the State has not done what it is required to do under the Constitution. Job-reservation is not the answer to the problem. Prof. Andre Beteille in his book (supra) has summed up the issue in the following words.
“What has gone wrong with our thinking on the backward classes is that we have allowed the problem to be reduced largely to that of job reservation. The problems of the backward classes are too varied, too large and too acute to be solved by job reservation alone. The point is not that job reservation has contributed so little to the solution of these problems but, rather, that it has diverted attention from the masses of harijans and Adivasis who are too poor and too lowly even to be candidates for the jobs that are reserved in their names. Job reservation can attend only to the problems of middle class Harijans and Adivasis : the overwhelming majority of Adivasis and Harijans, like the majority of the Indian people, are outside this class and will remain outside it for the next several generations. Today, job reservation is less a way of solving age-old problems than one of buying peace for the moment. It would be foolish to blame only the government for wanting to buy peace in a country in which everyone wants to buy peace. It would be foolish also to recommend an intransigent attitude to a government which has neither the will to impose its power nor the imagination to think of alternatives. But unless it is able to offer something better to the backward classes than it has done so far, reservation will continue to bedevil it… In assessing any scheme of reservations today, we have to keep in mind the distinction between those schemes that are directed towards advancing social and economic equality, and those that are directed towards maintaining a balance of power. Reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are, for all their limitations, directed basically towards the goal of greater equality overall. Reservations for the Other Backward Classes and for religious minorities, whatever advantages they may have, are directed basically towards a balance of power. The former are in tune with the spirit of the Constitution; the latter must lead sooner or later to what Justice Gajendragadkar has called a ‘fraud on the Constitution”.
[1] This article is an excerpt from the judgment of Indira Sawhney v Union of India 1993 (1) SCT 448