Damned if it does, and double damned if it does not. That's the position India Inc. finds itself in after the government's recent move to get its reservation-in-private-sector campaign underway. The immediate impact of this has been that everyone in India Inc. now knows who Sarita Prasad is: the lady is a senior bureaucrat, a secretary actually, in the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, but the post by itself doesn't guarantee visibility. Prasad's prominence comes from letters she shot off to various industry associations asking to be furnished with details of their workforce-the number of positions at junior, middle and senior management levels, the sex ratio, the proportion of scheduled caste, scheduled tribe and other backward classes, and the like-and drawing their attention to the ruling United Progressive Alliance's (UPA's) common minimum programme that mentions that reservations for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, hitherto followed only by government departments and public sector firms, would be extended to the private sector as well.

India Inc. is in a fix. It cannot come out and rubbish the move to reserve jobs for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes because that would be politically incorrect. Yet, companies cannot simply sit back and follow the government's diktat (it could come to that), not when they believe in meritocracy, or their own versions of it. The last mentioned (and this is a bit of a digression) involves hiring people from a certain caste or sub-caste, coincidentally the same as that of the promoters of the company in question, if all other things are equal between candidates. A south India-based auto components group and another south India-based publishing house have, in the past, showed a definite predilection for Iyengars, just as still another south India-based tyre major has for Syrian Christians.