The Telangana Congress demanded that the GO Ms No 16 issued by the state government on July 26, to include 36 castes in the MBC list, be cancelled.
Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee chief spokesperson Dasoju Sravan alleged that TRS government was trying to deprive the Most Backward Classes (MBCs) of the incentives to be given to them through the MBC corporation, and demanded that the GO Ms No 16 issued by the state government on July 26, 2018, to include 36 castes in the MBC list be cancelled.
Addressing a press conference at Gandhi Bhavan on Saturday, Sravan said that the GO 16 was incomplete and that a majority of the deserving castes were not included in the list.
"After remaining silent for over four years, just in view of the upcoming elections, the TRS government has come up with GO 16 with a list of 36 castes recommended for inclusion in the MBCs. This is incomplete and meaningless. The total population of these 36 castes is just about 3 lakhs across the state, when MBCs in reality constitute 34-35% of the state's population. Therefore, the TRS government is clearly misleading the people with its wrong approach," Sravan said
Sravan asked Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao to explain the basis on which only the 36 castes were included in the MBC list. He said that there were 112 castes under the BCs and they constituted about 54% of the total population, and at least 34-35% of the population, a subset of the BCs, were extremely backward and below the poverty line. These included the Chakali, Mangali, Arekatika, Perika, Vishwakarma, Kummari, Bondili, Satani and Padmasali castes, and Muslim castes like the Faqeer, Attar Sahibulu, Garadi Muslim and Turka Muslim castes, all of which were not included in the MBCs, which amounted to huge injustice to them, Sravan said. These castes were extremely poor and had been living as daily wage earners for very long, he claimed.
Instead of taking the services of the BC Commission or a specially appointed committee, the TRS government had finalized the list of 36 castes as MBCs based on a report submitted by four ministers and few irresponsible bureaucrats. This was nothing but depriving the poor BCs their due share in welfare schemes and other sops, Sravan alleged.
Sravan also said that the Telangana State BC Commission was acting as a mere spectator when many of the BCs were being discriminated against by the government, and that the commission had become reduced to a "bhajan mandali" of KCR. He pointed out that T Srinivas, who belonged to the Kummari caste, was the chairman of the MBC Corporation, but shockingly the Kummari caste itself was not in the list of the 36 castes identified by the government as MBCs. This showed who called the shots where the commission was concerned, Sravan remarked.