Transgender persons are likely to get 1% reservation in employment in public services and admission to educational institutions in Kerala shortly through a โquota within quotaโ mechanism.
The Kerala State Commission for Backward Classes has proposed a โhorizontal reservationโ for transgender persons where the eligible candidates will be accommodated in the reservation quota of their respective castes. The eligible transgender persons belonging to the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, will be provided reservation within the respective caste categories. The candidates whose caste details are unavailable and those from the forward communities would be accommodated in the general category. The โcreamy layerโ principle shall not apply to transgender personsโ reservation, according to the recommendation.
Supreme Court order
The panel headed by G. Sasidharan, former judge of the Kerala High Court, made the recommendation in line with an earlier Supreme Court order, which had asked the State and the Union governments to provide reservation to transgender persons. Incidentally, the recommendation comes a decade after the Supreme Court directive.
Reservation has been proposed for transgender persons by invoking Article 16 (1) of the Constitution, which provides for equal opportunity for all citizens in matters relating to employment or appointment to any office under the State. The horizontal reservation would ensure that the total reservation would not exceed 50% as fixed by the Supreme Court, sources said.
Preferential treatment
However, on the flip side, horizontal reservation could lead to a situation where a candidate eligible for caste-based reservation would lose the opportunity to an eligible transgender person of the same community as the latter would get a preferential treatment through the โquota within quotaโ system, sources said.
A transgender person can be identified based on the Certificate of Identity issued under Section 6 of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act or the Revised Certificate of Identity issued under Section 7 of the above Act, it has been recommended.
