United we stand

New Delhi, Nov. 22: Till now, if you wanted to know whether a particular university or company was more welcoming of all communities, castes or genders than another, you would mostly have to depend on surmise.

The Centre will now introduce a statistical model that can exactly quantify the “diversity index” among students of any educational institution, employees of any office or residents of any housing complex.

Armed with the index, to be implemented in one year, the government will offer incentives to these establishments to reach a certain level of diversity, in the process prodding them to further open up their admission policies towards marginalised sections.

First will come grants to educational institutions with higher diversity; then carrots and sticks for public and private employers and housing complexes.

The proposal, forwarded by an experts’ panel last year, has received clearance from all ministries concerned after some initial reservations, sources said. However, the government has not accepted the panel’s suggestion to let the fixed job and education quotas be replaced eventually by the more “flexible” diversity index (DI).

The flexibility may, however, make DI more acceptable than the quotas to private-sector companies. Officials, however, said the armed forces would not be brought under the ambit of DI. A headcount of minorities in the army had created a controversy three years ago.

The experts’ panel, formed by the first UPA government, was headed by Amitabh Kundu, a member of the National Statistical Mission, and included social scientists Ashwini Deshpande, Sugata Marjit, Muhammed Abdul Kalam and Haseeb Drabu.

DI, the panel says, will rate an organisation “at the micro or national level” and assign it a “value”. But a local company in Madurai will not score less if most of its employees are Tamils as long as they come from all castes, religious communities and genders.

The panel says the yardstick for an institution’s diversity will be the population profile of its “catchment area”.

“The proportion of all religious groups and genders in the district will be compiled. Then the proportion of eligible population will be compared to the proportion of the actual number employed. There is no standard macro-level parameter that becomes the benchmark. The benchmark for each institution will be worked out on the basis of (its) catchment area,” the panel says.

The panel has suggested a national diversity commission that will “take requests from different ministries and give them diversity indices” and state-level commissions that “will do the rating”.

It suggests a “decentralised framework”, with perhaps the University Grants Commission having “a separate index for all the universities” and ministries with many public sector undertakings in their fold having their own indices “with the approval of the national-level diversity commission”.

Each organisation or institution brought within the DI ambit must create a DI committee under the diversity commission’s guidelines.

“The DI committee shall analyse the existing employment/enrolment profile of the institution, send it to the state-level DI body for record, which shall also include the applicant profile in order that the qualificatory benchmarks are clearly laid out,” the panel says.

At first, the social justice and tribal affairs ministries had opposed the plan and the Central Statistical Organisation questioned the methodology and parameters used.

“We circulated the report among all stakeholders. There were some objections, but all have been cleared,’’ said a minority ministry official, declining to reveal details.

He said a high-level body would be formed to work out the parameters for assessing diversity in the various institutions once the Equal Opportunity Commission came into existence. The government is to introduce the Equal Opportunity Commission Bill in the current session of Parliament.