NEW DELHI: The Bihar government on Thursday approached the Supreme Court against the Patna HC’s order of putting an interim stay on the caste-based survey in the state. The move is to challenge the HCs May 4 order wherein the HC had also stayed dissemination of the information collected to parties, calling it a matter concerning right to privacy.
State in the plea has argued that the stay is causing irreparable loss to the State and would adversely affect the entire exercise as it was on the verge of completion. Challenging HCs finding that exercise of the Bihar Government of the caste-based survey would amount to a census, state in the plea has stated that power of the State to carry out such a survey is traceable to various entries of List III, Part-3 and Part-4 of the Constitution.
“The State has already completed more than 80% of the Survey work in some districts less than 10% of work is pending. The entire machinery is at ground level. There shall be no harm in completing the exercise subject to final adjudication of the dispute. The time gap to complete the survey would adversely affect the survey since this would not be contemporaneous data...the stay of collection of data itself would cause a huge loss to the State since, if finally the action of the State is upheld, the State would be required to put logistic in place with additional expenditure and burden on public exchequer,” the plea stated.