Sanjay Balan
Every few years, the Local Certificate (LC) issue in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands resurfaces. And every time, it is brushed aside as either emotional, outdated, or already “taken care of”. The usual reassurance is that reservations exist, benefits exist, and therefore nothing more needs discussing.
If that were true, this debate would not keep returning.
The Local Certificate was not some informal idea floated in local circles. It was introduced through executive policy of the Ministry of Home Affairs and implemented by the Island Administration for employment and higher education. When it was challenged in the 1990s, the matter travelled through the courts up to the Apex Court. At every stage, both the Ministry and the Administration defended the policy through affidavits, explaining why local protection was necessary in a small, fragile island territory.
The policy did not collapse because courts found it unfair or unconstitutional. It collapsed for a much simpler reason: there was no law behind it. No statute. No legal backing.
In short, LC did not fail on principle. It failed on paperwork.
What followed should have been straightforward. If the policy was worth defending up to court, it deserved a legal framework. That did not happen. Instead, a workaround quietly took its place. OBC categorisation was introduced in a society traditionally characterised by strong social integration, where territorial identity often took precedence over rigid social stratification, and gradually treated as a substitute for the Local Certificate. The unspoken message was clear: locals are covered, everyone is satisfied, and the problem has been solved.
Only, it hasn’t.
The Local Certificate was never about caste or class. It was about place. It recognised long-term residence, continuity, and the reality that opportunities in island territories are limited by geography itself. It applied equally across communities and religions. OBC, on the other hand, is a constitutionally recognised category meant to address social and educational backwardness. It has a clear purpose, a clear logic, and clear limits.
Asking OBC to do the job of LC is a bit like using a screwdriver as a hammer. It may work for a while, but it damages everything around it.
By treating OBC as a stand-in for local protection, two very different ideas were mixed up. The result has been predictable. A society that was never deeply divided along class lines now finds itself counting categories. A simple system has been replaced by a complicated one. Litigation has increased. Confusion has multiplied. And yet, we continue to insist that everything is fine.
There is another, more uncomfortable consequence. As long as OBC is projected as a complete solution, there is little incentive, from a purely administrative standpoint at the national level, to revisit the Local Certificate at all. Reservations exist, safeguards exist, and therefore there appears to be no legal gap to fill. The very mechanism meant to compensate for the absence of LC has ensured that LC no longer looks necessary.
This is the paradox we avoid talking about. LC disappeared because it had no law. OBC survives because it does. But OBC was never meant to provide territorial protection. We are left with a strong legal category doing the wrong job, and a sensible local policy denied legal recognition.
It is therefore unrealistic to expect that LC will receive a statutory “legal cloak” as long as OBC continues to be presented as its substitute. Governments rarely fix problems that appear, on paper, to have already been fixed. If we keep saying the issue has been addressed, we should not be surprised when no one addresses it.
This is not an argument against OBC. It is an argument against overloading it. OBC should do what it was designed to do—address genuine backwardness, with safeguards and exclusions. Territorial protection in a strategically sensitive and demographically limited region requires a different tool altogether.
The Local Certificate worked for years because it was simple, inclusive, and rooted in place rather than identity politics. Its undoing was not hostility from courts but hesitation from policymakers. That hesitation was later masked by an administrative shortcut, one that postponed a necessary decision but did not resolve it.
If differentiated governance is to have real meaning, differentiated territories must be governed with tools suited to their realities. The Local Certificate question therefore invites not confrontation, but clarity—about what problem we are trying to solve, and which instrument is best suited to solve it. A territorial challenge deserves a territorial response, grounded in law rather than workaround. That conversation, long postponed, is now worth having honestly. (The writer Mr. Sanjay Balan, though retired from government service, he continues to blend governance insight, land-law expertise, and candid public commentary in service of Island development) (Note: Views expressed in this column are writer’s own)
