Jharkhand govt turns the tables on oppn

Ranchi: The Raghubar Das government, which is in its 16 month of governance, has now started reaping the sweet benefits of being the first-ever majority government of the state.

More than one-and-a half decades after the vexed issue of identifying locals for reserving grade 3 and 4 government jobs for them led to a civil war-like situation in the state, it now appears to have been put to rest with the cabinet approving an almost all-encompassing policy, identifying also those residents (and their kin) who have been working here as state and central government employees, apart from those having settled here 30 years prior to this notification, which is 1985 as per their land records, as locals.

In 2001, the first chief minister of the state Babulal Marandi had proposed to adopt a policy from Bihar, which had led to violent clashes in the state in which at least five persons had died.

Marandi's proposed policy envisaged identifying those persons as locals who had their names registered in land records of 1932, which was the last survey done. The 1982 policy of Bihar was basically to give preference to locals working as unskilled labourers in factories.

''Let the past now bury the past so that the state leaps forward in development,'' said chief minister Raghubar Das on Thursday. Das, before coming to a decision, had consulted a cross-section of people, including opposition parties, retired bureaucrats and officials as well as intellectuals to ensure that there was minimum discrepancy or flaw in the policy. Das also made it clear that the quota for Schedule Tribes (STs) would remain intact and nowhere would the interest of the tribals be tampered with or hurt.

The policy, yet to be notified however, has put the opposition on the backfoot for whom the issue was an easy and ready tool to nail the ruling alliance. All through the months of the BJP-led government, the opposition has been accusing the government of being "anti-tribal" and "anti-local". Ironically, all the parties including the JMM and the Congress have been part of the ruling coalitions over the years.