TIRUNELVELI: The old wooden clock struck 12 followed by a blaring sound of the bell at a college in Madurai as a young man in his 30s wound up his class for a motley group of students. His speech revolved around one concern and thousands branching out from it – the issue of caste atrocities in Tamil Nadu. S Karthik, an activist, has been devoted to empowering the people belonging to the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities across TN.
From his teenage years to the present, Karthik has conducted many field visits to hundreds of SC and ST hamlets that reel under caste-based atrocities, and places that lack basic amenities. His findings, primarily gathered through the Right to Information Act, have had a profound impact on society.
Karthik’s revelations regarding unused, returned, and diverted funds originally allocated for SC and ST people echoed in the Tamil Nadu Assembly and the Parliament of India. People’s representatives from VCK and Communist parties raised the issue based on the detailed information he collected. The recent announcement by the state government to establish separate legislation for regulating SC/ST Sub Plan expenditure was the outcome of Karthik’s report, which exposed that the government had not spent around Rs 5,318 crore allocated for the welfare of SC people, over the past six years.
“I started off by volunteering for Tsunami relief and rehabilitation at the age of 18. So far, I have visited more than 300 villages affected by caste violence in both northern and southern districts of TN. I provide legal and financial assistance to the victims. I travel around the state on my bike and have covered about 20,000 km on it for a cause that may seem far-fetched to many. Through my field visits, I observed a lack of progress in education and employment opportunities within the SC and ST communities and improper utilisation of allocated funds. I then aimed to shed light on these issues with concrete evidence and work towards rectifying them,” says Karthik.
Karthik exposed that around Rs 927 crore allocated for various SC and ST welfare schemes remained unspent and was returned to the treasury between 2016 and 2021. His Public Interest Litigation (PIL) played a role in the State government launching a website to display scheme details for SC and ST individuals.
“It was also brought to light that around Rs 265 crore meant for ST individuals were diverted to other departments, including forest and rural development. I filed a PIL regarding this. Under the Ambedkar Foundation Financial Assistance scheme, only Rs 4.79 crore was allocated by the central government, benefiting 70 people in Gujarat and a mere five individuals in TN,” Karthik adds. He also uncovered through RTI applications that only 2.4% of professors in IITs belonged to SC and ST communities. Additionally, he revealed the government had not conducted adequate social justice awareness meetings in the 445 caste atrocity-prone villages of TN.
His other RTI inquiry disclosed that the central government allotted a mere Rs 12,000 to the state minority welfare department. “Following my report on the decline in the number of SC students pursuing Master’s degrees abroad with state government funding, the number of such students increased this year. Similarly, my report on the delay in constituting the Tribal Advisory Council led to the announcement of its formation by Adi Dravidar Welfare Minister N Kayalvizhi,” Karthik says.
Karthik has conducted over 100 awareness classes on the proper utilisation of budgets for SC and ST individuals in rural areas across Tamil Nadu. These classes target youth, self-help groups, students, and activists, with the participation of more than 4,000 individuals.
(Edited by Lisa Anthony)