Free Press Journal: New Delhi: Thursday, May 03, 2018.
Reservation
to the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) is
built into the policy for government employment, but the NITI Aayog, the
Centre’s policy think-tank created by Prime Minister Modi superseding the
Planning Commission, has demonstrated how to skirt the reservations.
Instead of
filling up its posts that would have warranted reservation, the Aayog has been
hiring ‘consultants’ claiming “procurement of consultancy services is not
regular employment against the sanctioned posts and hence norms of reservation
are not required.”
The
government employees’ associations fear this is a new idea slipped in by the
NITI Aayog that will be picked up by the government offices which are already
engaging staff for the past decade on the fixed-time contract instead of
appointing regular employees and paying them much less than the regular staff
despite the Supreme Court ruling that a contract employees must get the same
salary and allowances that are entitlement of a regular employee doing the same
kind of job.
In a Right to
Information (RTI) Act reply, it claimed to engage young professionals in terms
of Rule 178. So far it has picked up 68 consultants in this manner, but the
revelation showed that the Aayog flouted its own policy guidelines that “only
technical and management professionals” should be hired as the consultants.
Only 12 of the consultants engaged by it have any specialised background.
The RTI reply
shows that at least 28 hired by it as consultants are simple graduates or post
graduates among 46 young professionals and 22 senior consultants engaged till
March 20, 2018. Only 11 qualify as technical or management professionals as
required under the policy guidelines. Six of them are MBAs and five either BTech
or MTech.
If the
government departments pick up the cue from the policy think-tank, they may
resort to hiring consultants instead of the regular employees as it will not
only avoid the reservation requirements but also skip the employment through
the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) or Staff Selection Commission (SSC).
The NITI
Aayog is also sitting over the caste census report received by the government
in 2015. The caste census was ordered by the UPA government in 2011 to assess
the latest percentage of castes in the Indian society as all data used by the
government for various policies is 80 years-old. The government declared in
2015 to constitute an expert group to study the report, empowering the NITI
Aayog deputy chairman to set up the group under his chairmanship. The group has
not been set up till today.
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