Ineligible By Degree

There are jobs in government in which there is not a minimum educational requirement but a maximum and we came to know about it when a newspaper reported that the Surat Municipal Corporation had registered police cases against two of its employees because they were graduates and had lied to hide it. They were cleaning personnel and had been employed for many years there. But these were jobs with an eligibility condition that only those who had studied up to Class 9 could apply. The two had given false declarations of having studied up to Class 5 and Class 7.

If the charges are true, then they deserve punishment because it is wilful deception. By so doing, they took away the opportunity of oth­ers who fit the criteria. And yet, there is some­thing about the criteria itself that seems coun­terintuitive. Education is supposed to give you means of living, not take them away. If graduates are applying to be clean­ers then it is necessity driving them because they aren’t finding other employment offering equal emoluments.

There is usually a rationale to such rules and this is probably a progressive measure for the less literate to find work, the assumption being that the better educated have prospects elsewhere and weaker sections must get a helping hand. Literacy levels are an easy filter for this but it also gives the impression of a roundabout way to get to an objective.

If the target is the poor, the best form of eligibility is poverty. Turning it into a reservation for less-literates leads to contradictions. For instance, what if there is a very rich person who only studied up to the fifth standard, and a desperately poor post-graduate vying for the same job? Can the former get the job when the weaker among the two is the latter? This is a hypothetical. There is a strong correlation between literacy and poverty, which is what the municipal corporation is going by. But it still doesn’t lead to an automatic substitution of one for the other.

cleanereducationeducation policyemploymentjob eligibility