Every once in a while, the inflammable locals-for-jobs issue is ignited in cities and states across India, usually with the government of the day proposing or moving a legislation to reserve jobs for ‘locals’ which prompts a predictable backlash, usually from the private industry. It was the turn of Bengaluru-Karnataka this week. Decades after the debate erupted and took several ugly turns, whether in Mumbai-Maharashtra or Assam, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, the issue remains unsettled.
The Karnataka cabinet okayed a Bill to mandate that half of all managerial jobs and 75 percent of non-managerial jobs be filled by ‘locals’ who, it defined, as those born in the state or domiciled for 15 years — which have been the criteria for job reservation in other states too — and knows to speak, read and write Kannada. The Bill, introduced on Monday, has since been withdrawn and Karnataka’s ministers have been bending over backwards to mollify the hurt sentiments of IT majors and corporate bodies that took exception to the Bill, warning that they might pull out of the state — neighbouring states were quick to jump in with invitations — and the move will “drive away companies”.
This script has played out many times and many decades earlier, with varying results. Back in the day, when the city was still Bombay and the neo-liberal forces were yet to be unleashed by globalisation, the Shiv Sena, then only a two-year-old party, wrote this story. Eager to make a mark as something more than a ragtag bunch of musclemen, led by relatively sedate leaders such as Sudhir Joshi and Pramod Navalkar, the party established the Sthaniya Lokadhikar Samiti to get native Maharashtrians into the city’s white-collar jobs to dispel the notion that the community was only capable of being mill hands and blue-collar workers.
It was, as I explained in a story in February 1995 for a national news magazine, the Sena’s work-table face with the single-minded objective of protecting and promoting employment for Maharashtrians. In 1987, the SLS barged into the plush environs of five-star hotels in south Mumbai demanding that jobs be given to locals; a decade later, its foot soldiers stormed Air India offices in its iconic building hoping to persuade the bosses there, with their rough-and-tough methods, to employ locals or else — the threat was always left unsaid but everyone understood.
The sons-of-the-soil concept, a problematic construction in itself but one that has gained legitimacy with even the Supreme Court using it — came to be strongly associated with the Sena founder and chief, the late Bal Thackeray. The Shiv Sena, Thackeray, and Bombay/Mumbai received a great deal of censure and condemnation for this — rightly so. The limitations of the sons-of-the-soil approach to jobs should have become clear back then, certainly so now. Yet, states have resorted to it — Gujarat did back in the 1990s, Jharkhand introduced a Bill last year, Haryana passed a Bill in 2020, Andhra Pradesh in 2019. Some have made it about private sector jobs, as the Karnataka Bill does.
It has no Constitutional basis, as high courts and the apex court have reiterated time and again while hearing petitions against it. In 2008, when the issue reared its head again in Mumbai, the SC unequivocally termed it as dangerous and stated: “This is one country and we will not accept the sons-of-soil theory. We will not permit the Balkanisation of this country.” In an earlier case, the apex court had stated that such claims “…are breaking asunder the unity and integrity of the nation by fostering and strengthening narrow parochial loyalties based on language and residence within a state”.
While Constitutionally untenable, the sons-of-the-soil or jobs-for-locals policy is hardly beneficial for the economy or the society of the state or city, as academic researchers have shown. Socially, such legislations turn the native residents against the ‘outsider’ provoking tensions that have often turned violent. At the height of such an agitation in Mumbai by the Sena’s variant, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, two young men were dead, one of them in a local BEST bus which he sought to hijack. Bengaluru, now in the eye of the storm, has seen anti-migrant violence and vandalism. The collective social anxiety among native residents is usually a question: what will happen to ‘our’ culture when so many migrants make ‘our’ city their home?
This is about jobs and economic progress. Even at the economic level, this approach sets off migrants — pejoratively called outsiders — against non-migrants though they have, more or less, similar skills and socio-economic backgrounds. People fight one another, linguistic groups battle each other — for the same jobs. Invariably, the legislations have proposed a ceiling in monthly pay, usually around Rs 25,000 to 30,000 a month. Most of the Bills introduced in states, including the Karnataka one, has such a floor.
This means migrants holding plush positions, senior managerial posts, the white-collar and government jobs are beyond the reach of such laws or motivated agitations. The target is usually the poor migrants coming from rural source destinations that are in the grip of economic or agrarian crisis or, lately, environmental extreme weather that has upended their lives there. During such crises, in a political economy framework that gives primacy to development in cities — an urban bias, as development economists call it — people will naturally migrate to cities for work.
The jobs-for-locals theory argues that large corporations and organisations that base themselves in a city enjoy tax concessions and incentives of the concerned state government and, therefore, should give jobs to locals. And that migrants need to learn the local language to blend into society. The language question is cultural and multi-dimensional, but the city as a melting pot of languages and cultures is what sets it apart from provincial areas, after all. There are older native areas and newer cosmopolitan areas. There are ways to make corporations give back to the city they are located in — and have enjoyed benefits of — such as investing in its physical and social infrastructure rather than mandating that they toe the job-for-locals line or face penalisation.
Reserving jobs for locals is like carving out a pie so that locals have a mandated share; the better way is to enlarge the pie itself. Make the city’s economy so robust that there are more jobs — for everyone. And repair rural economies so that fewer want to migrate for jobs. The issue is real; the legal solution is deficient.
Smruti Koppikar, senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’
