#obcs

The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data on prisons show that Dalits and Tribals continue to be jailed in numbers disproportionate to their share of the population, unlike OBCs and those belonging to the general category. According to the National Crime Record Bureau report titled ‘Prison Statistics India 2021’, around 30 per cent of all the convicts, 29.54 per cent of undertrials and 37 per cent of detenues in Tamil Nadu’s prison are Dalits who constitute 21 per cent of the state’s population. At the end of 2019, tribals made up 3.20 per cent of all convicts in jails across the country. The share of Scheduled Tribes among undertrials languishing in jails stood at 2.97 per cent. The 2011 census put the tribal population in the state at 1.10 per cent.

Various surveys have confirmed that the other backward classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are over-represented in the proportion of poor. The forward caste groups are considerably better off as a class or group, even if there are poor individuals amongst them. Therefore, the reservation has always dealt with class poverty. By determining a class on the basis of economic criteria – income below Rs 8 lakh per annum of a family or individual – the EWS quota, ex facie, infringes the principles of constitutional equality and renders the concept of reservation, as known to the Indian Constitution, virtually unrecognisable. In short, EWS is ambiguous, arbitrary and alien to the established principles of constitutional equality.

The prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs, come under the government mandated quota of 27% reservation for OBCs and 15% and 7.5% for SCs and STs, respectively. But this does not necessarily ensure diversity at these elite institutions. In December 2020, in response to a Right To Information application filed by student organization Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle, IIT Bombay said 11 departments – including four engineering departments – at the institute did not admit a single student belonging to Scheduled Tribes between 2015 and 2019. Two departments did not admit any SC students at all.