Only a 10th of disabled quota filled, OBCs way short of
central job quota
At a time when the country is celebrating Ira Singhal’s achievement in topping UPSC, the fact remains that disabled candidates occupy only a 10th of the central government posts reserved for them. The reservation is 3 per cent for the disabled category but only 0.3 per cent (9,339 out of 29.59 lakh) of the present central government workforce belong to that category, according to an RTI reply to The Indian Express from the Department of Personnel and Training.
The DoPT said in its response dated June 30, 2015, that the data is for 71 departments of the Union government. The government has 91 departments, including the President and Vice President’s secretariats, but DoPT did not specify which departments are absent from the information provided. The data does not include contractual staff and consultants because they do not come under the purview of reservation.
In terms of community reservation, too, the SCs, STs and OBCs are short of their quota in central government jobs. The shortfall is actually only among the OBCs, who represent 17.7 per cent of the workforce against a quota of 27 per cent, implying that roughly a third of their quota has been filled by non-OBCs. The SCs and the STs, in fact, either exceed or match their quota.
The actual representation of the three groups adds up to 43 per cent (SC 17.6, ST 7.7 and OBC 17.7) when the quota for them is 49.5 per cent (SC 15, ST 7.5 and OBC 27). This implies that 6.5 per cent of occupied government posts, or 13 per cent of the reserved 49.5 per cent, have been occupied by employees of the general category when these should have been reserved.
Of the total central government strength of 29.59 lakh, 5.19 lakh belong to SCs, 2.28 lakh to STs and 5.24 lakh from OBCs. The remaining 16.87 lakh account for 57 per cent when the balance for the general category works out to 50.5 per cent.
For the gap in representation of OBC employees, a possible reason is that reservation for OBCs started only in 1994 based on the Mandal Commission report. Again, the representation of disabled employees is poor evidently because reservation for them was introduced only in 2004. The highest representation of the disabled is among Group-B employees, with 1.6 per cent belonging to that category. In all other employee groups, they count for less than 1 per cent.
The SCs, STs and OBCs have their highest representation among safai karmacharis followed by Group-C excluding safai karmacharis. The OBCs’ representation is slightly higher in Group-C (other than safai karmacharis) in comparison to SCs but in Groups-A, B and C (safai karmacharis) the OBC proportion is lower than that of SCs.
Among Group-A officers, general category employees have the highest representation (69.3 per cent). In Group-B, too, 67.4 per cent officers belong to the general category. Among safai karmacharis, the general category count falls below 50.5 per cent to 43.4, mainly because of the high SC count.
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