The government has announced 50% reservation for backward classes in all three streams of the Kerala Administrative Service (KAS).
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan told the media on Tuesday that the Cabinet received legal counsel that the government should treat all the three streams as direct recruitment to implement reservation across the board in all the categories of induction into the KAS.
The KAS envisages the first stream as induction through direct recruitment. The second stream is for appointment to non-gazetted posts by effecting transfers of existing personnel and the third for filling gazetted posts through redeployment.
The minimum educational qualification for induction into the KAS is a university degree, and the age limit for candidates is 50 years.
Mr. Vijayan said the government would amend the law to make the approved changes.
The Cabinet also appointed a commission to fix criteria for gauging the economic backwardness of forward castes people to accord them reservation in education and employment.
Retired district judge K. Sasidharan Nair and K. Rajagopalan Nair, lawyer, would be its members. It also appointed former High Court judge M.R. Hariharan as chairman of the three-member Forward Castes Commission.
The Cabinet included the Boyan, Kodangi Nayickan, and Naidu communities on the list of educationally and socially backward classes eligible for reservation.
The Cabinet also cleared a proposal to take ₹3,500 crore as loan from the World Bank to rebuild flood-hit Kerala. The Chief Minister said the State’s liquor policy for the new fiscal would be the same as the one for the last financial year.
The government would give three cents or ₹6 lakh to people living without a title on public property and had lost their dwellings in the floods last year.
