What began in New Delhi last month as a doctors' strike to protest an affirmative action proposal for disadvantaged Indians, spread over the weekend and is threatening to flare into a government versus industry battle.
As a strike by thousands of doctors and medical students intensified on Monday, services in dozens of hospitals across the country were disrupted.
In India's technology capital of Bangalore, 500 medical and engineering students marched in the streets over the weekend.
PHOTO: AFP
The protests are a reaction to a federal proposal that calls for nearly half of the jobs at government hospitals and half the seats at medical schools to be reserved for lower-caste and other disadvantaged Indians.
Several ministers have gone further and pushed for legislation to reserve spots at other types of schools as well as jobs in private companies for people belonging to disadvantaged groups.
Supporters of the proposal say that India's economy, which is growing by eight percent annually, has only accentuated the inequalities of Indian society. In a television interview over the weekend, India's industry minister, Kamal Nath, declared that the government was committed to affirmative action and that it wanted to ensure that growth was "inclusive."
But some industry executives said that increasing affirmative action in the private sector would rob the country of its competitive edge. In fact, unregulated labor markets and the country's education system are credited with the spectacular growth of India's outsourcing industry.
"There is rising concern that affirmative action in jobs will erode competitiveness and put off multinational firms," said Partha Iyengar, vice president for research at the Indian operations of Gartner Inc, a technology research and consulting company.
Iyengar said that companies were lobbying against a large-scale move to reserve jobs in the private sector.
"If affirmative action is enforced in the outsourcing industry, for instance, it will lead to resource turbulence," said Iyengar, who said challenges like language and culture would reduce the employable pool of candidates for companies.
Representatives of the Confederation of Indian Industry, India's largest industry group, said that foreign investors were watching the latest developments carefully.
Affirmative action is a thorny political issue in a country where much of the economy is farm-based and about one in three Indians live on less than a dollar a day.
About two-thirds of India's 1.1 billion people live in villages with poor access to schools and even less access to well-paying jobs. More than half of India's schools have only one teacher for every two classrooms.
At the same time, applicants fight fiercely for admission to India's most prestigious medical and technical schools.
Competition is more intense than in Ivy League schools in the US. And global companies like Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Microsoft and General Electric routinely hire graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS