The Justice A. J. Sadashiva Inquiry Commission, which looked into methods of equitable distribution of reservation facilities among Scheduled Castes (SCs), has recommended internal reservation among the castes by broadly reclassifying all the 101 castes into four groups. As a suitable law has to be brought in by Parliament to incorporate the recommendation, the commission has asked the State to take up the matter with the Union Government.
Disclosing this to reporters after submitting a report to Chief Minister D.V. Sadananda Gowda here on Thursday, Mr. Sadashiva said that the commission had recommended reclassification of all Scheduled Castes into four groups of Right Community, Left Community, Touchables and Other Scheduled Castes communities for equitable distribution of the overall reservation of 15 per cent that is being given to Scheduled Castes.
Of this reservation of 15 per cent, the commission has recommended 6 per cent to Left Community, 5 per cent to Right Community, 3 per cent to Touchables and one per cent to Other Scheduled Castes communities, he said.
The above quantum of allocation of reservation benefits to the four groups were made after assessing their socio-economic and educational development through a door-to-door survey of 96.60 lakh persons belonging to Scheduled Castes, he noted. This included 1.58 lakh persons employed in Union and State government establishments.
Giving the break-up of population of the proposed groups, he said of the total 96 lakh population of Scheduled Castes, the Left Community accounted for 33.47 per cent, Right Community 32 per cent, Touchables 23.64 per cent and Other Scheduled Castes communities 4.65 per cent. The numbers do not add up to 100 per cent as about 6 lakh members among the Scheduled Castes have desisted from mentioning their castes during the survey.
“While the exact reason for this is not known, we feel that it could be due to the social insult as they may have suffered some social problems earlier,” he said.
He said the survey results had indicated that the Right Community had got more benefits from reservation than the other Scheduled Castes communities as comparatively they were in a better situation in terms of education and employment.
Expressing dissatisfaction that on an average the implementation of Scheduled Castes welfare measures were not effective, he said the commission had recommended setting up of enforcement and evaluation wings to not only monitor the implementation of these schemes but to find out if they were effective.
Pointing out that the commission had worked for six years and eight months, he described it as the longest-serving judicial commission in the State.
The Chief Minister said that the Government would take steps for the implementation of the commission's recommendations after examining them.
The State Government had constituted the commission in 2005 when N. Dharam Singh was the Chief Minister to ascertain whether there were any discrepancies in the distribution of benefits under Articles 15 and 16 of the Constitution and whether these benefits were equally distributed among all castes and groups included in the Scheduled Castes list. The commission had been set up following complaints by the most backward communities among the Scheduled Castes that some castes among Dalits had cornered all reservation benefits, while others had been denied their share of Constitutional rights.
