By Our Reporter
SHILLONG, Aug 25: Exactly 75 days after bowing down to surmounting pressure from all corners and announcing that an expert committee would be constituted to review the Meghalaya State Reservation Policy of 1972, the state Cabinet on Friday finally approved the names for constitution of the five-member expert panel. The names were shortlisted by the three-member search committee headed by Chief Secretary DP Wahlang.
On June 1, the state government had announced that it would constitute the expert committee as demanded by pressure groups and political parties alike. VPP president Ardent M Basaiawmoit had sat on a 10-day hunger strike to get the demand fulfilled and had ended his fast only after the government announced the formation of the expert committee.
MDA spokesperson Ampareen Lyngdoh said the expert committee will be headed by Justice (retd) Mool Chand Garg, former Judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, as Chairman.
Justice (retd) Dr. Satish Chandra, former Judge of the Allahabad High Court, will be the expert member in Constitutional Law; Prof. DV Kumar, of the Department of Sociology, NEHU, will be the expert member in Sociology; Prof. Chander Shekhar, Department of Fertility and Social Demography, Indian Institute of Population Sciences (Deemed to be University), Mumbai, will be expert member in Population Studies while Prof. Subhadip Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy at IIM Shillong, will be the expert member in Economics.
Justice Garg, it may be recalled, had conducted the inquiry into the “rice scam” that was unearthed in 2021.
Defending the move to not include even a single indigenous person as member of the expert committee, Lyngdoh said it was done to remove any bias against any of the three indigenous communities in the state.
The expert committee would study the existing job reservation policy and recommend modifications, if necessary, besides undertaking wide ranging consultations with all stakeholders and visit various locations of the state to solicit the views of all stakeholders.
The committee has been given a time frame of 12 months to complete its task.
With the constitution of the expert committee, the Committee on Reservation Roster headed by Lyngdoh has ceased to exist.
The submissions made by various political parties like the UDP and the KHNAM will now be forwarded to the expert committee for perusal.