Reservation menace!

Recently I read an article in the New Indian Express captioned "No to caste enumeration". The politicians when they are pressed by Caste organisations for more reservations, new reservations and for inclusion in the list of Backward classes/most backward classes/scheduled caste /tribe and when they are questioned by right thinkers that how you have decided about 'educational backwardness' of a certain caste without proper statistics on the population of the caste and the number educated among them they reply and pressurise Govt. to order caste wise Census. The article categorically opposed such moves. The author is socialogy professor in Anna University.

All the present day evils on reservation started only when the Constitution amendment included the two words "and educationally" to the existing sentence giving power to the State to provide reservation to the "Socially..Backward Classes". To measure educational backwardness among castes there is no proper statistics and the Govt. is including castes only on the basis of the voting and other muscle power of the caste organizations.

During Vanniars' agitation, in Tamilnadu, all the caste organizations met MGR who was the then CM and demanded reservations for their castes also. MGR told them to furnish statistics about the number of people in their respective castes and when they furnished the figures it amount to thrice the population of Tamilnadu.

The clamour for inclusion in the backward classes list is comparatively more in Tamilnadu. Each and every caste started their own organizations to put forth their demands and came to the streets with sevaral kinds of agitations. Accordingly the Government's list of backward classes also increased day by day and culminated in notifying 215 castes as backward classes.

There is a little difference in the names of castes found in 'forward'list and backward list. Therefore it has become easy for the forward castes also to get caste certificates as the one belonging to backward classes thanks to the all prevalent corruption among Govt. officials. It is quite common to see forward class people such as 'kamma naidu' 'kappu naidu' 'vellala mudaliar' 'veerakkodi vellalar''beri chetty' and several others as 'kavarai', 'thuluva vellalar' 'sozhia vellalar' 'vania chetty' to quote certain examples.

There were 40 Kamma naidu families in a tiny hamlet in 1970. A minister in the Tamilnadu Government does belong to that village and caste. Now there are only 3 families and all the others have obtained backward classes certificates.

At present if castewise Census is ordered to be done in Census 2011, according to Census ACt, the census enumerators have no power to enquire into the veracity of the particulars furnished by a citizen in the Census. So, when one citizen says that he belonged to certain caste the enumerator has to simply write it down. Even if certain powers are invested to him, the enumerator can only demand proof and they will eventually produce certificates from the Tahsildar or ask them to give time to obtain and produce one. Moreover if caste wise census is taken that would only facilitate such people mentioned in the previous paragraph.

The politicians and the vote bank politics are to be blamed for taking our society to this point of no return in regard to the problems of castes and reservations. Moreover they will only care about reservtions to higher education and govt. clerical jobs. They won't care about to send all children of school going age to primary and high schools without omission. Even after 62 years of independance this has not been achieved.

A thorough study in this regard should be undertaken along with Census 2011 formulating a fool proof procedure in consultation with jurists, educationists and intellectuals. Reservations might continue only on that bais, if it was found useful.