Getting the ball rolling to provide internal reservation for Scheduled Castes (SC) communities in Karnataka, the Justice Nagamohan Das Commission has recommended classifying the 101 castes under the SC list into five groups.
The Commission, which submitted its report to the state government on Monday, has also specified the reservation quota for various SC groups. The recommendations are expected to be taken up for discussion by the state Cabinet during its next meeting.
According to sources, the first of the five groups is classified as the most backward. For these communities, which have a total population of around 5 lakh in the state, a reservation of 1 per cent of the 17 per cent available for SCs has been recommended. As per the Commission, the communities lagged in social and economic indicators, compared to other backward SC groups.
The backward SC Left communities are classified under group two, which consists of sub-castes such as Madigas. The Commission has recommended 6 per cent reservation for them.
Group three has SC Right castes, such as Holeyas, and the Commission has said they should be provided 5 per cent reservation.
The ‘touchable’ SC communities in the state, such as Banjara, Bhovi and others, will be offered 4 per cent reservation, followed by another 1 per cent to SC groups falling under the Adi Karnataka, Adi Dravida and Adi Andhra castes.
The recommendations are different from the ones the erstwhile BJP government decided to implement at the end of its tenure in March 2023. Under the scrapped internal reservation policy of the BJP, the SC Left community was given 6 per cent of the 17 per cent reservation quota for SCs, the SC Right 5.5 per cent, the ‘touchable’ SC communities 4.5 per cent, and other SC groups 1 per cent reservation.
Panel had recommended fresh SC survey
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The Nagamohan Das Commission was formed in November 2024 after a Supreme Court decision allowed state governments to sub-categorise the various SC groups to provide internal reservation.
In its interim report submitted earlier this year, the Commission had recommended that the government go for a fresh survey of SC communities, noting that there was no empirical data on the population of various SC groups.
The survey, which enumerated around 27 lakh SC families in the state, began in May. Though it was to be completed in a fortnight, problems faced in data collection in Bengaluru Urban have delayed the exercise.
The state government had also decided not to notify any fresh appointments for government posts until internal reservation quotas for SC communities were notified.
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Efforts to implement internal reservation for SCs in the state date back to 2005, when the Karnataka government formed the Justice Sadashiva Commission to provide internal reservation to SC communities. It had recommended 6 per cent reservation for SC Left communities, 5 per cent for SC Right groups, 3 per cent for ‘touchable’ castes, and 1 per cent for other SC castes.
The Basavaraj Bommai government had decided to increase reservation for SCs from 15 per cent to 17 per cent. Following this, a Cabinet sub-committee was formed under former law and parliamentary affairs minister J C Madhuswamy to look into internal reservation.