CHENNAI: The Union government recently announced 10 per cent reservation for the economically weaker sections among the upper castes. However, replies given by various wings of the Union government to RTI applications by a city-based academic indicate that the government does not even have a list of castes that fall under the category of upper caste.
Activists question how the government had arrived at the figure of 10 per cent when it did not even have this basic information, leave aside information on overall population or economic conditions of the upper castes. E Muralidharan, a former member of the Board of Academic Research, IIT Madras, filed an application in 2017 under the Right to Information Act seeking the number and list of upper castes in each of the States in the country. Since none of the wings of the Centre had the information, his application was shunted repeatedly between various offices. In 2017 and 2018, the RTI application was circulated twice between the Prime Minister’s Office, Union Home Ministry, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment and the Registrar General, Census of India.
One of the few replies he got on March 16, 2018, from the Office of the Registrar General of India & Census Commissioner said, “Other than the notified SCs/STs the data is not available/published for other castes/communities separately.”
Muralidharan wondered how ORGI could say information on upper castes was not available given that the Socio-Economic and Caste Census was conducted in 2011. He filed an appeal before the Central Information Commission, New Delhi and it is still pending.
Meanwhile, in January, the Union government cleared the proposal to give 10 per cent reservation to the economically weaker sections of the upper castes and set a criterion that those with an annual income of lesser than `8 lakh (about `67,000 per month) would fall under the definition of economically poor.
“If this basic information is not available, certainly the economic data will not be available. So, how the 10% reservation for the poor upper castes was arrived at needs to be answered by the Central government,” said Muralidharan.
When Express asked persons with knowledge of caste-based reservation systems, none seemed to have come across any list of upper castes complied so far. “There is no such list. There is no administrative mechanism also to identify such a list of castes,” said former IAS officer R Christodas Gandhi, who has worked for the welfare of the socially downtrodden sections.