MADURAI: The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court on Friday issued notice to the central and state governments on a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) that sought a direction to conduct a comprehensive survey or census on the socio-economic and educational status of Devendrakula Velalar community in Tamil Nadu and to consider proposals seeking their exclusion from the Scheduled Caste (SC) category only based on the results of the survey.
Litigant C Selvakumar, an advocate and founder-president of Madurai Maavatta Devendrakula Velalar Uravinmurai Sangam, said in his petition that a vast majority of the community, especially those in districts like Ramanathapuram, live in extreme poverty.
“The community’s inclusion in the SC list has provided essential educational and economic safeguards, which have only recently begun to show minor results in the socio-economic advancement of our people. But, a section of individuals is propagating a narrative that the Devendrakula Velalar community has achieved total social and economic parity, and should therefore be excluded from the SC list. This is a baseless claim not supported by any official data,” he said.
Such misinformation has caused significant confusion and distress among the youth of the community, as they fear the loss of constitutional safeguards while still facing ground-level backwardness, he further said, adding that a scientific survey is the only way to establish the empirical truth and protect the community’s interests.
Instead, any premature exclusion of the community from the SC list, when its members are yet to attain self-sufficiency in the professional, educational and socio-economic spheres, without any scientific basis, would push them back into extreme backwardness, he added.
A bench of justices G Jayachandran and K K Ramakrishnan orally remarked that these matters are policy decisions of the government, but issued notice to the authorities concerned. The case was adjourned to March 27.