Short Note : 13 point Rooster

The 13-point rooster is a method employed to provide reservations in teaching posts in a University by taking discipline/subject as the unit, instead of accounting for the entire university.

What is the 13-point rooster?

• The 13-point roster takes a department as one unit and implements separate reservation recruitment policy for a single department as a unit.
• The earlier prevalent system of recruitment was the 200-point roster, where a university was taken as a unit.
• In the earlier 200-point roster, 101 seats were unreserved and 99 were reserved ( after 27% reservations were granted to the OBCs). Since a university was taken as a unit, if there was a deficit of reserved seats within a department, it could be compensated by recruitment in some other department.
• As per the 13-point rooster, the first, second, third, fifth, and sixth posts will be unreserved in a department, while the fourth will be reserved under the OBC category, the seventh will be reserved under the SC category, the 14th post will be reserved under the ST category, and the eighth and 12th under the OBC category, while the ninth, tenth and eleventh will be unreserved.
• This will work well in large departments. However, in departments with small size, affirmative action reservations will be impacted as less or even no reserved category seats will exist.

What changes with it?

The use of a 13-point rooster would reduce the posts reserved for SCs by half, those for STs by almost 80%, and those for OBC teachers by 30%.

The inclusion of EWS category would only further reduce the seats available to the other depressed communities in the list.

The system is currently being discussed and debated in the Rajya Sabha as The Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Bill, 2019.