While the five states are on an ongoing election mode with prime minister Narendra Modi and his entire entourage including the home minister Amit Shah, national chief J. P. Nadda etc extremely busy in extensive campaigning giving concessions to the electorates, the Congress party leaders like its chief Mallikarjun Kharge and former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi too are trying their best to expose the ills of the BJP led government and releasing menifestoes assuring freebies, even beating the Aam Admi Party record in this regard.
However, the issue of caste reservations has gain tremendous momentum with Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, who’s party is an important constituent of I. N. D. I. A. taking the lead by tabling its latest report on caste census in Bihar Assembly and the former’s proposed initiative to increase the reservation in jobs in government services and educational institutions for people of scheduled castes and sheduled tribes categories, Other Backward Classes and Extremely backward Classes covering 65% population of Bihar which excludes the ten percent reservation mandated by the central government for economically weaker and underprivileged sections of the society.
This in total comes to about 75 % reservation with remaining 25% covering the rest of all the forward castes and those not coming under the non reserved categories.
This caste census as initiated by Nitish Kumar in Bihar is considered to be a great effort to give benefits to about 75% of population of the state thus improving their socio economic backwardness under which these sections were reeling for the last several decades.
Even the former Congress president Rahul Gandhi and the entire CWC has unanimously passed a resolution declaring that if the India National Inclusive Democratic Alliance forms a government 2024 after the general elections it will follow the footsteps of Bihar and carry out the caste consesus nationally to ameliorate the deteriorating socio economic conditions of the people of lowest ebb of the society hailing from Extremeky backward classes apart from SC, ST, Backward classes and OBC.
The BJP led NDA is believed to have been badly perturbed after this development feeling insecure in the forthcoming general elections in 2024 if this new initiative of caste census really clicks.
The proposal of the Bihar chief minister to give reservation in jobs and educational institutions to 75% people of SC, ST, BC, OBC and EBC if really fructifies, the chances of which are 100% sure than it will certainly bypass the fifty percent cap on reservations fixed by the highest court of the country.
Highly enthusiastic Bihar chief minister seems to be extremely confident on this front saying that he will have consultation with everyone and it is his intent to get this implemented clarifying that the women reservation quota of 3% has been scrapoed.
According to the latest news if we go by the Bihar government’s proposed reservation quota the Extremely Backward Classes will get 43% resetvation in addition to 20% reservation to Scheduled Castes and two percent for STs.
This means that in Bihar the reservation cap will enhanced by thirty percent more than prior reservation arrangement.
Kindly recall that the present reservation status in Bihar is as following : 18% for E B Cs, 12 percent for backward classes, 16 percent for scheduled castes and one percent for scheduled tribes.
If we look at the latest survey of all castes by Nitish government in Bihar 36.1% of the state’s 13.1 crore total population are from Extremely Backward Classes while the Scheduled caste population consists of 19.7 %. The ST population is just 1.7. The general category comes to just 15.5% of the entire Bihar population.
This percentage of various castes lead to an unambiguos conclusion that more than 60% population hails from backwatd and extremely backward classes with seventy percent of the job quota in government jobs to go to SC, ST, OBC and EBCs in future in Bihar.
