Nearly 17 years after the implementation of 27% reservation for OBCs in central government jobs on the basis of the Mandal Commission recommendations, a mere 6.87% of those employed in various union departments in Groups A, B, C and D services belong to the group.
Thus a significant 20% posts across categories and departments reserved for OBCs remain unfilled raising doubts on the effective implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations. Documents obtained under the Right To Information Act (RTI Act) by Chennai-based biomedical engineering and activist, E
Muralidharan, reveal that just 1,93,228 OBC employees including 2,430 sweepers were employed in different central government departments as on January 1, 2008.
The union personnel, public grievances and pensions ministry has said that the reservation for OBCs was implemented from September 8, 1993. According to the information provided by the ministry, only 5,031 Group A officers belonging to the OBCs were employed in central government services, which constitutes just 5.5% of the 91,881 employees recruited in that category. Likewise, the percentage of Group B employees was only 3.9% (total 1,37,272) and that of Group C was 8.1% (total 18,10,141) and the composition of Group D employees excluding sweepers was 5% (total 6,96,891).
Of the vacancies for sweepers only 3.2% were filled with OBCs, which indicates that very few persons belonging to these communities had applied for the post. In contrast, 51.4% of the 75,901 sweepers in central government officers belonged to the Scheduled Castes and 6% hailed from the Scheduled Tribes.
Muralidharan had sought two key details. One, the total number of posts under Group A, B, C and D categories in all central government offices; and two, the percentage of OBCs presently employed in these posts as of 2009. However, the ministry said that details of the total posts weren't centrally maintained. With respect to the OBC employees, it said that information was available only as of January 1, 2008 and the information for 2009 was yet to be received. The ministry said the statistics "doesn't include information in respect of six ministries/departments" but didn't name them.
However, implementation of reservation in government jobs has been by and large successful when it comes to SCs and STs. Of the 22% vacancies reserved for members of the Scheduled Castes, 17.45% of vacancies have been filled, which in real numerical terms represents 4,90,773 jobs. Likewise, in the case of STs, 6.83% of the 7.5% vacancies earmarked for them have been filled up.
