Shillong, May 31: The Ampareen Lyngdoh-led committee of all political parties on Wednesday said the need to constitute an expert committee to review the state’s job reservation policy will be one of its suggestions to the state government.
“That (constitution of an expert committee) will be one of the suggestions to be sent to the government by the committee,” chairperson of the committee Ampareen Lyngdoh told reporters after chairing a meeting with leaders and representatives of all political parties.
According to her, the committee of experts should have legal background, constitutional background, economical background and somebody from the economic department that will look at data and evaluation of population.
Lyngdoh, who is also Minister in-charge Law, however said that not all political parties are in agreement to have an expert committee.
“There are political parties who agree and there are political parties who do not agree. So we will do our job by sending the minutes to the government that were discussed in the meeting,” she added.
When asked, the chairperson said, “Like we said we are all in agreement that you need a very specialized committee, a committee which has somebody from the constitutional side, somebody from the economics, survey and statistic side and somebody who is expert in law and likely that kind of a committee you will have to likely solicit their participation and this committee is not authorized as we are only going to suggest (to the government).”
Lyngdoh said that different political parties have their different opinions on the issue of the job reservation policy.
“Some have asked for status quo, some have said review on these, these points but all those presentations were made verbally. Now, we cannot make a verbal presentation in front of the committee and expect the committee to understand what you mean by that,” she said while adding “The second thing is you may come with a drop menu and say we want this, this done but you also have to give justification so that government if at all it considers any of your suggestions or for that matter that expert committee should it be an independent committee or should it not be an independent committee we don’t know but you at least have to justify and each political parties will be responded to individually and then we can have a common discussion again.”
Asking all political parties to submit their written suggestions on the matter within a period of 15 days, Lyngdoh said, “We have requested all political parties to prepare their suggestions, omissions, cancellations, deletions with substantial legal footing as we can always suggest whatever we want but we need to also make sure that we clear the legal scrutiny as the state political parties are mandated to review with condition that there will be no obstruction or scrutiny that will result negatively for the government.”
“Therefore, we will summarize all of our discussions and forward them to the government. But pending hard copy submission with legal justification (by the political parties) unlikely this committee can meet and discuss anything,” she asserted.
Further, Lyngdoh also termed the discussion on the reservation policy as vibrant and said some political parties feel that we must go ahead with the recruitment once the roster is made clear to those political parties that were not part of the previous meeting held and some say that put the recruitment on hold.
“So there was a mixed suggestion here and in the meanwhile, we have requested all political parties that we will accordingly submit all of these deliberations to the government and the government will then review and take a decision on all the suggestions that we submitted,” she added.
The chairperson also informed that the two political parties – VPP and KHNAM – who did not participate in the first meeting of the committee and were not privy to the discussion on the roster system – will be again meeting with the officers to satisfy their understanding of a proposed roster system.
Meanwhile, the committee is proposing to meet again after three weeks.
