Date:22/04/2006 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2006/04/22/stories/2006042213080400.htm

Karnataka - Bangalore

Rathod for quota in private sector

Staff Reporter

`Private sector should help uplift backward classes'

BANGALORE: Everyone should welcome reservation in the private sector for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and industry should participate in drafting new legislation for it, Congress MLC Prakash Rathod said here on Friday.

Mr. Rathod who belongs to the Lambani (Scheduled Caste) community, told presspersons that after Constitutional guarantees ensuring reservations for the backward classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the fields of education and government employment, the next phase of reservation that brought jobs for other backward classes at the Union Government level had come on account of the initiative of the P.V. Narasimha Rao government.

In Karnataka, it was the late Chief Minister D. Devaraj Urs who came to be hailed as the messiah of the backward classes as he revived reservation in jobs and higher education on caste basis for them after a 13-year interregnum (1964-77) when income-based reservations for other backward classes prevailed in the State.

The times had changed now. The Government had encouraged private industry with all kinds of sops and incentives in the expectation that the sector would join government efforts to cover a larger number of the backward classes and help in their uplift, he said.

"This is the moral responsibility of the private sector, and it must respond positively to the initiative of making new laws that will help implement reservation," Mr. Rathod said.