Time to widen ambit of reservation: Amarinder

The time has come to widen the ambit of reservation and extend it to economically weaker sections, Punjab Congress chief Capt Amarinder Singh said today amid the agitation for Jat reservation which rocked Haryana and other parts of northern India.
"While caste-based reservations as enshrined in the Constitution cannot be dispensed with, the time has come to expand their ambit and bring the economically weaker and disadvantaged sections of the society from the general category also within its purview.
"We only need to widen the ambit of reservation and not reverse it," he told reporters here.
Amarinder, the Deputy Leader of Congress in Lok Sabha, called for political parties to arrive at a mutually-agreeable stand so that situations like the one prevailing in Haryana are avoided.

"Otherwise, in the time to come, the demand for reservation might become too frequent and may be difficult to control as these have the potential to turn violent," he said.
The former Punjab chief minister also sought to make it clear that by supporting the demand for reservation to economically-weaker and disadvantaged sections from the general categories and upper castes he "did not mean abolishing the existing caste-based reservations" and making economic status as the sole criterion for granting quotas.
He said the existing system that grants reservation to members of Scheduled Castes (SCs), Backward Classes (BCs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) has been enshrined in the Constitution and should continue.

"But there is a growing demand, and a justified one, to provide similar benefits to the economically weaker sections from the general categories and upper castes," he said, adding that the time has come to widen the ambit of the reservation policy.