CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu took nearly five decades to give its Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Sub-Plan, a policy framework from the 1970s meant to ring-fence a share of the state budget for the community, the backing of law in 2024.
The legal gap is now at the centre of research by Bagavanidhi M, the inaugural Ambedkar-Kalaignar Visiting Fellow at SOAS University of London, whose fellowship term ends this month.
Bagavanidhi, a sociologist with over a decade of civil society work on Dalit and Adivasi welfare rights in Tamil Nadu who was picked from 88 applicants for the inaugural fellowship, is researching the Sub-Plan’s shift from a planning mechanism to a legislative one at SOAS’s South Asia Institute, tracing the run-up to the Tamil Nadu Development Action Plan for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Act, 2024.
“It was a policy framework formulated in the 1970s, a percentage of the budget that had to be spent on the community. It took until 2024 for Tamil Nadu to bring that under a legal framework with accountability. That is my first question: how and why did it take this long to become an Act?” Bagavanidhi told TNIE.
The Ambedkar-Kalaignar Visiting Fellowship, instituted in honour of Dr B. R. Ambedkar and M Karunanidhi, is part of the SOAS Initiative, inspired by former Chief Minister MK Stalin’s son-in-law Sabarisan Vedamurthy and daughter Senthamarai Stalin.