“The purpose of a system is what it does,” Stafford Beer once said: not what its charter claims, not what its founders intended, not what its defenders insist it’s secretly working toward once the numbers look bad. The line comes from Beer’s work in cybernetics and systems theory, but it travels well, because it was really a warning against taking any institution’s word for itself. Apply it to the state and the sentence stops being quippy and starts being uncomfortable. A state does not do what its Constitution’s preamble promises. It does not do what its bare acts say it must. It does what its politicians ignore until an election forces a promise out of them. It does what a police force using violence on citizens with impunity does. It does the slow torture bureaucrats in government offices administer by attrition. It does the routine ignoring of injustice courts specialise in. Everything else is marketing.
A state’s default setting isn’t a neutral one, but it isn’t a fixed conspiracy either: it simply doesn’t move unless it’s made to. Every gain anyone has pulled out of a state came after someone made not conceding more expensive than conceding.
Reservation itself carries the memory of that fact in its own founding story. Ambedkar’s original demand, at the Round Table Conferences, was a separate electorate for the Depressed Classes: our own constituencies, our own voters, our own representatives answerable to no one else’s veto, a political existence independent of Hindu society rather than embedded inside it. The Communal Award of August 1932 granted exactly that. Gandhi, in prison, announced a fast unto death to force its withdrawal, blackmailing the Depressed Classes and its leaders as well as the British rulers, on the ground that a separate electorate would permanently divide Hindu society. Ambedkar held out against a starving man for days before the political pressure, not the argument, became unbearable on practical grounds, and what emerged from the negotiation at Poona was not the separate electorate but reserved seats inside a joint electorate: more seats than the Award had granted, 148 in the provincial legislatures instead of the original allotment, but folded back into the same political body Ambedkar had tried to exit. Reservation was not the original ask. It is what remained after the original mandate was made impossible by someone else’s leverage and the Hindu moral bankruptcy behind it. The instrument defended for ninety years since it has itself been a settlement, arriving at under duress, from a wider claim.
Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All India Independent Scheduled Castes Association (AIISCA), made a version of this point at a press meeting on private sector reservation in Delhi on 27th September, framing reservation as something closer to a treaty than an entitlement: a thin, fragile thread and the only one tying Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs to the Indian state, functioning not as generosity but as a negotiated peace. It buys the state and the dominant castes who still hold most of the country’s assets a measure of calm from a majority whose rightful share has otherwise been denied, while giving the numerically dominant Bahujan population some working proxy for the democratic weight their numbers should carry. A contract, not a gift. Except a contract is only as good as what a party can be made to perform under it, and a state that already treats its own preamble as marketing will treat a contract no differently.
A contract implies parties, and a state, unlike a private employer, actually has one with its citizens. It demands loyalty, taxation, submission to its law, alongside the monopoly to dictate the political fates of those within its territory, in exchange for a set of standing obligations back. A private firm asks for labour under a contract either side can in principle at least walk from, and owes nothing back to someone who was never bound to it in any comparable way. That asymmetry is a large part of why a claim on the state’s own hiring is different in kind from a claim on a firm’s, not because the state behaves more responsibly in practice, as we are all well-aware, but because it owes something on the terms of the relationship itself. Although an obligation the state owes but doesn’t perform is worth exactly as much as a preamble it doesn’t act on.
A private firm is not identical to the state, and the case for reaching it anyway doesn’t depend on pretending otherwise. It rests on two separate facts. The economy itself has changed since the framers drew the line at public employment, and a social justice framework confined to the public sector now leaves most of economic life untouched, because most of it no longer sits inside the public sector at all, a gap widened further by the same state’s ongoing privatisation of what public capacity remains, shrinking the one terrain where proportional representation currently carries legal force. But the second fact runs deeper and doesn’t depend on how recent liberalisation is: a private sector built on land, credit, licenses and infrastructure the state provides, privatising its profits while routinely and unsparingly socialising its costs through subsidy, tax concession and public investment, has never sat outside the state’s reach in the first place, this was true of Indian capital before 1991 as much as after it. A firm that depends on the state which itself takes from the public commons for that much can never be allowed to answer to nothing beyond its own balance sheet.
Even so, there’s a real limit to what representation alone produces. Elevated individuals from a movement or caste often become instruments of the institution’s own legitimation rather than being accountable to the base that elevated them, and when they try to push further beyond the constraints and the logics of those systems, they get cut down by the sheer weight of social forces unwilling to tolerate the progress already made. Despite that, political reservation has still converted into something more durable than individual token presence, an independent structure of Bahujan power that didn’t exist before it, even as oppressor-caste violence against that rise has grown alongside it. What government service has that the private sector doesn’t is exactly this: decades of organised structure built up around the reserved seat, structure that keeps contesting the ceiling even where it doesn’t break through it. The private sector has never had an equivalent foothold, and no amount of employer voluntarism has ever built one. That’s the case for statutory reservation even in its thinnest form: not that a quota alone delivers equality, especially substantively, but that it’s the minimum legal anchor around which durable, organisable power can be built at all.
Against that backdrop, private sector reservation is not a new demand groping for its first hearing. It has been formally raised for close to two decades. The All India Confederation of SC/ST Organisations was pressing the case as early as 2012, organising a march on Delhi backed by three dozen SC/ST organisations, arguing plainly that no nation stays strong while its economic and social levels remain this split. But even before that, in 2003, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee addressed a meeting of SC and ST MPs and said that the private sector cannot exist in isolation and has to be responsive to the needs of the society, making it essential to have reservation in the private sector. This was followed by a broad consensus among electoral parties across the ideological spectrum on the matter, even though it has not yet been translated into political will or substantive action. One concrete effort came in 2006, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, when he appealed directly to Indian industries to become the government’s partner on the question. However, rather than legislate a mandate, the government let industry regulate itself: CII, FICCI and ASSOCHAM each adopted a Voluntary Code of Conduct built around four pillars, Employability, Education, Entrepreneurship Development and Employment. That October, the PMO had already constituted a Coordination Committee on Affirmative Action in the Private Sector, chaired by the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, drawing on the Department of Personnel and Training, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, and serviced by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion. The Committee has met nine times since. By 2010, the government’s own review found adoption of the voluntary codes was slow; by 2013, it was still describing the same dialogue as ongoing; by 2015, industry associations were reporting hundreds of member companies signed on. Twenty years of this arrangement has produced a voluntary code without enforceable duties, and industry associations professing over a lakh of beneficiaries with no verifiable representation data to back the figure. Now we cannot sit once again with a renewed appeal for goodwill. What is needed is to go beyond an empty promise and fight for a statutory guarantee: a binding quota, backed by rule of law, not another code any signatory can stop honouring when they feel like it.
On 26 July 2024, that demand reached Parliament directly. Chandrashekhar Azad, MP for Nagina, introduced a private member’s bill titled the Reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes in Private Sector Act, 2024, one of three private member’s bills he introduced in the Lok Sabha that day. It covers private firms, educational institutions and other establishments employing at least twenty people with no government financial stake. Even this bill stops short of a binding hiring quota: its mechanism is incentive-based, requiring the central government to induce private firms toward reservation through special concessions and lower-interest loans via nationalised banks, with an annual implementation report tabled in both Houses. Structurally, a private member’s bill has almost no chance of becoming law: enactment is the exception, not the rule, and has been for decades. That a bill this cautious, relying on incentives rather than quotas, remains a private member’s bill and is still pending says something about how far Parliament remains from treating this as settled business.
But the case for the demand itself rests on documented discrimination. Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell’s 2007 correspondence study sent matched applications under upper-caste Hindu, Dalit and Muslim names to private-sector job advertisements in the English dailies and found discrimination operating at the very first screening stage, before any interview, before any assessment of merit beyond a name on a page. Zahra Siddique’s 2011 work went further, quantifying the size of the gap and who was driving it: low-caste applicants had to send 20% more resumes than high-caste applicants to get the same callback rate, with the disparity sharpest when the recruiter was male or Hindu, and more pronounced at smaller firms than larger ones. Axmann, Swanson and Cuspinera Contreras, using Indian Human Development Survey data in 2016, found significant wage discrimination against Dalits and Adivasis specifically inside the private sector. Madheswaran and Singhari, drawing on National Sample Survey employment data the same year, found SC workers earning less than equally qualified forward-caste workers in urban labour markets, with the gap wider in private employment than public, and unequal access to occupations itself doing much of the work in producing the disparity. Pattayat’s 2024 study of rural non-farm workers, using NSSO and PLFS data spanning 2004-05 to 2019-20, found the earnings gap persisting across that entire period and examined how much of it discrimination itself accounted for.
Article 15(5) already gives the state constitutional room to act on half of this. Inserted by the 93rd Amendment in 2005 and in force since January 2006, it permits special provision by law for socially and educationally backward classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in admission to educational institutions, explicitly including private institutions, aided or unaided, with the sole carve-out for Article 30(1) minority institutions. Because education sits on the Concurrent List, both Parliament and state legislatures can act under it, and several states have already legislated on private educational admissions. Tamil Nadu enacted a 2006 law providing 69% reservation for Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes and Denotified Communities, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in private educational institutions. Andhra Pradesh had already applied SC, ST and Backward Class reservations to admissions in private professional institutions through its admission rules. Karnataka’s 2006 Professional Educational Institutions Act provides for 50% reservation for SCs, STs and OBCs in unaided non-minority professional institutions. Maharashtra enacted a 2006 law providing reservation for SCs, STs, Denotified Tribes, Nomadic Tribes and OBCs in private professional educational institutions, while Haryana’s 2016 Backward Classes Act provides reservation for Backward Classes in admissions to educational institutions, including private institutions.
What that record shows is that Article 15(5) has been given statutory effect at the state level, but unevenly and without a nationwide framework. A Parliamentary Standing Committee report presented to the Rajya Sabha in August 2025 said that private educational institutions are currently under no national legal obligation to implement reservation because there is no central statute mandating it. It recommended that Parliament legislate 27%, 15% and 7.5% reservation for OBCs, SCs and STs respectively in private higher educational institutions, with government reimbursement of the associated costs on the model of the Right to Education Act. Although a sincere Caste Census may tell us that the necessary numbers should be much higher, the constitutional ceiling on reservation itself also needs to be revisited.
What Article 15(5) doesn’t reach at all is employment, and that gap isn’t small: education and employment were never separable; a degree that doesn’t convert into a job is a credential, not a livelihood. One state that tried a binding private-sector quota by its own legislation ran straight into that trap. Haryana’s 2020 State Employment of Local Candidates Act mandated 75% reservation for domiciled candidates in private jobs under a salary threshold, with a 10% district sub-cap built in, not a caste quota, a domicile one. The Punjab and Haryana High Court struck it down in 2023 as unconstitutional and violative of Part III of the Constitution; the challenge to that judgment remains pending before the Supreme Court. The deeper problem predates the ruling: the 93rd Amendment gave the state constitutional room to reach private education specifically and never extended that room to private employment. Domicile was the classification that failed here, not caste, but replacing domicile with caste would not by itself resolve the Article 19(1)(g) problem, because no amendment has yet done for employment what the 93rd did for education. That is what this demand still needs and hasn’t gotten: not just a statute, but a constitutional amendment opening the same room for private employment that the 93rd opened for private education, without which any statute meets the wall Haryana did.
Winning that room would still only secure a narrower claim than the one Ambedkar himself eventually made. Private sector reservation, at its most comprehensive, means reservation in private employment, reservation in private educational institutions, and an Equal Employment Opportunity Act as organizations like AIISCA and others have been demanding: legislation with a working complaint mechanism, an investigation process, ongoing monitoring, and real accountability, reaching recruitment, wages, promotion, workplace treatment, termination, occupational allocation, contract employment and professional advancement, not just the moment of hire. That last piece is the one twenty years of voluntary codes never touched, because a Voluntary Code of Conduct had no enforceable complaint mechanism and no statutory consequence for ignoring it. A statute would. But even this full slate, a foothold at every stage of the employment relationship, asks only for fair terms of entry into an economy whose ownership stays exactly where it already is. It is a claim to be treated fairly inside the room. It has never been a claim on who owns the room.
Ambedkar’s own economic writing sits alongside all of this as one part of a longer record, that expands the horizon of economic fight itself. In States and Minorities, the memorandum he prepared for the Constituent Assembly on behalf of the Scheduled Caste Federation, he proposed a state control over economy in which key industries would be owned and run directly by the state and basic industries owned by the state and run through its own corporations, with land held under state ownership and cultivated through cooperative farming, aimed at dismantling landlordism and the agrarian exploitation caste had built itself around. That program was never incorporated into the Constitution in the form Ambedkar proposed. Although a version of that was found in the Nehruvian socialist project, which was itself eventually given up in the face of global neoliberal onslaught. What it shows, regardless of anyone’s own view of state ownership as a remedy, is how early and how directly Ambedkar located the actual target in who owns the economy, not merely who holds a fair position inside it.
Ambedkar’s economic target, and the demand for reservation in the private sector, concern forms of structural injustice that are harder to see than the moments when that injustice erupts into visible violence. That shapes not only who gets to have this conversation and on what terms, but who is willing to listen to it. Oppressor-caste liberals attend to Dalit-Bahujan life most readily through the news cycle of atrocity, because atrocity is visceral and immediately legible, while the guilt of a grieving conscience often springs into action only when Dalit-Bahujan rage forces that attention. A Dalit-Bahujan body demands attention in a way a hiring statistic does not. A wage-discrimination dataset spanning fifteen years, a Coordination Committee that has gone nowhere, a bill pending in Parliament since 2024, none of these produces the same urgency because none offers an easy villain, a headline image or a clean moment of collective horror to perform. Grieving a corpse asks nothing ongoing of anyone. But there is a real villain here, even if it is harder to identify in any single moment: the state, which owes more than what it does and routinely shows where its priorities lie, alongside the structural violence produced through years of oppressor-caste apathy at best and antipathy at worst.
The historical record here is a caution, not a reason to wait. What survived Poona wasn’t Ambedkar’s original demand: it was a narrower settlement that still had to be fought for afterward, seat by seat, for decades, before it was more than ink. The same will be true of a private-sector statute and an Equal Employment Opportunity Act alongside it. Winning them will not finish anything on its own; a seat is captured as often as it’s built on. Beer’s sentence applies once more, now to the law: a statute’s purpose isn’t what its statement of objects and reasons says either. It’s what the Act does. Whether the complaint mechanism gets used, whether a violation carries any real cost, whether the oversight committee holds its next meeting or goes missing in action the way it already has. None of that follows from any bill becoming an act. It follows only if the pressure that forces the act into existence keeps being applied after it exists. Because a state, as established, only holds what it’s made to hold.
Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.
