The UGC directive of March 5 to universities on taking “department” rather than “university” as a unit for reservation is the latest onslaught on Dalit rights. (Illustration: CR Sasikumar)
The Constitution of a country signifies the sacred compact between different classes. Any dilution of the principles on which these groups had come together amounts to the breach of social contract. The Dalits were given assurances after the Poona Pact (1932) about the abolition of untouchability and fair representation through affirmative action. Untouchability is still widespread, at least in rural India, and the law that was enacted to deal with the atrocities against Dalits has now been diluted by the Supreme Court.
The UGC directive of March 5 to universities on taking “department” rather than “university” as a unit for reservation is the latest onslaught on Dalit rights. This regressive decision will adversely affect the diversity at our universities. Under the new formula, Indira National Tribal University in Madhya Pradesh has recently advertised just one post as reserved out of 52. Under the earlier formula, there would have been as many as 20 such posts.
As per government policy, we should have 15 per cent reservation for the SCs and 7.5 per cent for the STs in public universities. But today, only seven of 100 teachers in colleges and universities are from the underprivileged sections. Only 1,02,000 — or 7.22 per cent — of the 1.4 million teachers in 716 universities and 38,056 colleges in India were Dalits in 2016. The ST faculty was just 30,000 — a meagre 2.12 per cent.
The Narendra Modi government, which boasts of giving unprecedented honour to B R Ambedkar — has not taken any concrete step in reversing this ill-conceived policy of the UGC. The UGC decision is based on the April 4, 2017, judgment of Allahabad High Court in Vivekanand Tiwari v. Union of India. The appeal against this highly controversial judgment was dismissed in one line by the bench of Justices Adarsh Goel and U U Lalit. The review application was rejected on March 30 by the SC — the same day the controversial SC/ST Act judgment was delivered by the same bench.
As per official data, there are 17,106 teaching positions at 41 UGC-funded central universities, of which 5,997 or 35 per cent were vacant as of April 1, 2017. The poorest record is of the Banaras Hindu University, where out of 155 SC assistant professor posts and 74 ST posts, only 86 and 24 have been filled. In the Vivekanand Tiwari case, an advertisement of BHU for teaching positions was challenged. BHU was following UGC policy of treating the “university” as the unit for reservation.
The courts have used the differences between “cadre”, “service” and “post” to arrive at the conclusion that the “department” should be the unit of reservation. Thus although lecturers, readers and professors in a university have the same scale and allowances in their respective cadres, they cannot be clubbed together. Since there is no scope of interchangeability of posts in different disciplines, each post in a particular discipline is to be counted as a separate post.
This logic shows that judges are not fully conversant with the working of our universities. It seems the judges were anxious that some departments will have only reserved posts and whereas some others will have none in the same category. But this rarely happens, unless a department is very small. If the new formula is not reversed, there will be no SC/ST cadre positions at the level of professor since most departments generally have just one post of professor. Hence, the chances of Dalits becoming head/dean will also become remote. Thus clubbing together of all the posts of professors in a university as a whole is the only logical thing to do.
It seems the disastrous effects of taking “department” as the unit for reservation have not be properly argued in these cases. Since the review has been rejected, the Modi government is well within its rights to promulgate an ordinance to restore “university” as the unit of reservation. Every university spends a lot of time in deciding its reservation quota and tries to balance the interests and needs of various departments. We should trust our universities and give them at least the autonomy to decide which post of which department is to be reserved.