Out of 82 Secretaries to the Government of India, only four are from Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe communities, Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions Jitendra Singh told the Rajya Sabha on Thursday.
“There is one Secretary each belonging to the SC/STs in the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, Department of Land Resources, Department of Pharmaceuticals and Ministry of Labour & Employment,” he said in response to a written question from Communist Party of India MP K. Somaprasad.
It’s not just the top echelons of government service that have low representation from these communities. There are only 11 faculty members from them currently teaching at the 20 elite Indian Institutes of Management in the country, Human Resource Development Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank told the Rajya Sabha in answer to a question from Congress MP Partap Singh Bajwa.
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Two of the top IIMs in the country, those at Ahmedabad and Kolkata, are among the 12 IIMs that do not employ any SC/ST faculty at all. Five IIMs, including the ones at Bengaluru and Lucknow, employ one SC/ST faculty member each, while the IIMs at Kozhikode, Shillong and Jammu have two each.
The HRD Ministry is now cracking down on this situation. On Wednesday, it sent out an order to all IIM directors directing them that reservation rosters must be prepared and followed for all future recruitment, in accordance with the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Act, 2019. This mandates the following quotas: 15% reservation for SCs, 7.5% for STs, 27% for socially and educationally backward classes (usually termed OBCs) and 10% for economically weaker sections.
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Some of the IIMs have been resisting faculty reservation on the grounds of a Central government order issued almost half a century ago, which excludes scientific and technical positions from the scope of reservations. In Wednesday’s letter to IIM directors, the Ministry explicitly notes that these fresh orders supersede all previous orders with respect to reservation at IIMs.