TENKASI: The demand for a significantly higher number of social justice awareness meetings in caste atrocity-prone villages and effective measures to curb the incidence of caste violence, has grown louder with the surfacing of an RTI application reply from the Social Justice and Human Rights Unit of the Tamil Nadu Police. Madurai district has 43 atrocity-prone villages, the highest in the State, while Viluppuram with 25 villages and Tirunelveli with 24 also feature on top of the district list. However, as per the RTI reply, only 24 social justice awareness meetings were held in Madurai district between January 2021 and March 2022.
Social activist S Karthik, who had filed the RTI application, said as many as 78 meetings were held in the villages in Tiruchy district between January 2021 and March 2022. "But, the situation is grim in other districts. The Public Information Officer of the Social Justice and Human Rights Unit said the police identified 445 villages as atrocity-prone and another 341 villages as dormant-atrocity-prone in Tamil Nadu in 2021. Only one area in Chennai district features in the list," he said.
"Data from the National Crime Records Bureau reveals that the crimes against Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) members had increased by a whopping 27.3% in the country from 2009 to 2018. Even so, the number of social justice awareness meetings being held in Tamil Nadu is not on the rise. The police have held 2,560 meetings from January 2018 to March 2022 in the State. The Adi Dravidar Welfare and Social Welfare departments should join hands with the police to enhance awareness programmes against caste violence," Karthik added.
Pointing out that the inter-caste tea party organised during the previous DMK regime had helped instill harmony among people of various castes, the social activist demanded more such hands-on measures from the government. "In 2008, the then State government had allotted about `70 lakh to this programme and subsequently reached out to 17 lakh people in atrocity-prone villages. However, in the last five years, the government has not allotted even a single rupee to the police department to implement such measures, noted the RTI reply," he said.
When contacted by TNIE, Social Justice and Human Rights Wing Additional Director General of Police NK Senthamarai Kannan said the State government was not allotting any funds to the wing. "Also, the Superintendents of Police keep assigning bundobust duties to the Deputy Superintendents of Police, whom the social justice wing had posted in all the districts to conduct awareness meetings. Further, the DSP posts have not even been created in the nine newly-created districts," he said.
Superintendent of Police in Tenkasi district R Krishnakumar said several such meetings have been held in atrocity-prone villages in the district. "The number of caste crimes is also on a decline here," he added.