OBC quota Bill referred to House panel

NEW DELHI: Ending days of intra-alliance wrangling, the Manmohan Singh government on Friday — the last day of the monsoon session — tabled the OBC Reservation Bill in the Lok Sabha, which immediately referred it to the standing committee.

As expected, the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Bill, ’06, which was introduced after Question Hour by union HRD minister, makes no mention of the “creamy layer”, making it clear that quota-hawks such as Lalu Prasad Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan, Anbumani Ramadoss and the DMK contingent had succeeded in getting the law ministry’s proposal to exclude the creamy layer from the ambit of OBC reservations jettisoned.

While making out a case for the “staggered’’ implementation of the quota regime over a period of three years from the academic session ’07-08, the Bill, in section 3, spells out four categories of institutions which will be kept out of its purview. It includes eight institutes defined as “centres of excellence, research institutions, institutions of national and strategic importance.’’

They include the Mumbai-based Homi Bhabha National Institute and its 10 affiliates such as Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay; Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, Kalpakkam; Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, Indore; Institute for Plasma Research, Gandhinagar; Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata; Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata; Institute of Physics, Bhubaneshwar; Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai; Harish Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad; and Tata Memorial Centre, Mumbai.

The other institutions falling in this category are Tata Institute of Fundamental Reserach, Mumbai; North-Eastern Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Health and Medical Science, Shillong; National Brain Research Centre, Manesar, Gurgaon; Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore; Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad; Space Physics Laboratory, Thiruvananthapuram; and Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Dehradun.

The provisions of the Bill will also not apply to central government institutions running in tribal areas, minority educational institutions and “any course or programme at high levels of specialisation, including at the post-doctoral level, within any branch of study or faculty, which the central government may, in consultation with the appropriate authority, specify.’’

The decision to refer the Bill to the standing committee for finetuning its provisions had a conciliatory effect on the striking medicos, engineering and management institute students, who, later in the day, announced the suspension of their anti-quota stir for three months. They’ll now wait for the report of the standing committee, which has been asked by speaker Somnath Chatterjee to submit its report during the winter session of Parliament.

While earmarking 27% seats in higher educational institutions for the OBCs, the Bill, for the first time, gives a statutory status to reservations for the SCs and the STs in these bodies.

In order to ensure that merit does suffer in the process, the Bill makes it mandatory for these educational institutions to increase their seats in a ratio that does justice to the “general’’ category students. Institutes which are unable to increase their seats because of logistical problems will be allowed to go in for a phased implementation of the quota regime.