Nudged by Congress high command, Karnataka to undertake fresh socio-educational survey of castes

Government sources said that there was opposition from a few Cabinet Ministers to junk the 2015 survey and take up a new one.

Close on the heels of Congress central leaders asking Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy CM D.K. Shivakumar to undertake a fresh survey of Karnataka’s population, the Cabinet on June 12 decided to hold a fresh socio-educational survey — a demand of the politically dominant Vokkaliga and Veerashiava-Lingayat communities.

As and when the new survey will be taken up, it would be the second survey of sorts in Karnataka.

Incidentally, when the first Siddaramaiah-led government conducted a survey in 2015 at a cost of ₹165 crore, Karnataka was the first State in India to undertake such an exercise after the national survey conducted by the British in 1931. Bihar and Telengana have done the survey after Karnataka completed its survey.

When Chief Minister Siddaramaiah’s response was asked if the State Government was under pressure from the Congress high command, the Chief Minister said, “The process was on. The high command has also advised a new survey. Just because they asked us to do a new survey, we are not doing it. We have not succumbed to pressure from the high command.”

In the post-Cabinet meeting briefing on June 12, Mr. Siddaramaiah told presspersons, “The Cabinet decided to hold a fresh survey as 10 years have lapsed since the last survey was conducted. As per the Karnataka State Commission for Backward Classes Act, 1995, a fresh survey is mandated after every 10 years. A lot of changes would have taken place in these last 10 years in the social and educational realm.”

The Chief Minister claimed that the delivery of social justice was possible on the basis of the new report. He said that the Cabinet had, in principle, agreed to the survey report submitted by K. Jayaprakash Hegde, the previous chairperson of the Karnataka State Commission For Backward Classes.

On asked why the State Cabinet accepted the report despite the passage of 10 years, he said, “Only after discussions started did we realise that, by law and constitutional provisions, it was 10 years old, and a fresh survey was needed. The provision in the Act is clear that a new survey has to be conducted every 10 years, after which a new list of backward classes could be drawn up by either deleting existing castes or adding new ones.”