Nearly 20 years after the never-accounted-for Dalit population of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands was clubbed with the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category by the Union Territory administration, and a decade after the Centre did the same, a parliamentary committee has now called for a special panel to evaluate the issues faced by the Scheduled Castes in particular, and ensure their representation in services in the islands.
The Parliamentary Committee on Welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, headed by BJP MP Kirit Premjibhai Solanki, has noted that there was a “significant presence of Scheduled Castes in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands”, also suggesting that they should be considered for welfare schemes and service matters.
But no census has ever recorded any Scheduled Caste population in the Andaman and Nicobar (A&N) Islands and neither has the Constitution (SC) Order ever listed any community as SC in the islands – something that was flagged by the erstwhile National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (NCSCST) as far back as in 1999 as a “vital problem”.
Wrong categorisation
The commission had noted at the time that the people it was referring to as Scheduled Castes were refugees from Bangladesh, who had been resettled on the islands by the Government of India’s Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation Department till as late as 1980, further saying that they had migrated to the islands as refugees “in large numbers”.
In a report tabled in Parliament last week, the House committee on the Welfare of SCs and STs said it had asked the Union Territory administration to form a special panel to study issues of representation and welfare schemes of the Scheduled Castes of the islands in particular, and report the action taken at the earliest.
The Committee Chair, Mr. Solanki, told The Hindu, “It is correct that there has been no official count of the Scheduled Castes. But it is not as if there are no Scheduled Castes. There are some in small numbers in Port Blair and the committee’s recommendation was to ensure that their issues are heard, they are able to access government schemes accordingly, and that they are represented adequately.”
First-hand information
The committee’s recommendation came after a study visit it had undertaken to the islands in August this year, during which the Chairperson was accompanied by 20 other MPs from both Houses and from across party lines. Sources said the issue of Scheduled Castes was flagged by some of the MPs at a meeting with senior administration officials at Port Blair.
The Scheduled Caste population, which is concentrated in and around Port Blair town, are mostly migrants from other parts of the country such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh.
Challenges ahead
But the House panel’s recommendation to set up a special committee for this purpose comes with its own set of challenges as the administration will have to start with little to almost no information on who the Scheduled Castes in the islands are, which communities they are from, what their socio-economic position is with respect to other communities on the islands, and whether there is a need to create an SC list for the Union Territory (UT) for their classification, which can only done by Parliament and notified by the President.
Reservation woes
The issue had briefly come up before the Andaman and Nicobar Commission for Other Backward Classes, formed in the wake of the Indra Sawhney judgment of 1992, which paved the way for the implementation of an OBC reservation of 27%. This commission had acknowledged the existence of an “overwhelming number of” Scheduled Caste people among the migrants from Bangladesh who were resettled as refugees on the islands but clubbed them under the category of “Post-1942 settlers”, which was then notified as one of the Other Backward Classes of the UT in 2006.
It had noted that these people would have been counted as Scheduled Castes had they been in West Bengal. While recommending 38% OBC reservation in the UT, the A&N OBC Commission had justified the increased percentage by saying that since the SC people had been clubbed with the OBC category along with the Bengali settlers, the reservation that would otherwise have gone to the SCs should be added to the prescribed 27%.
However, the UT’s OBC Commission had left a roadmap in the event that any of these communities were ever classified as Scheduled Castes. It had said that in such a case that these communities are identified and classified as such, any reservation for them should be culled out from the 38% already assigned to the OBCs in the UT.
The erstwhile NCSCST, in its Fifth Report of 1998-99, had noted that it had tried to draw the attention of the Census Department and the local administration to the issue of including the Scheduled Castes in the censuses several times but to no avail.
Neither the 2001 Census, nor the 2011 Census recorded an SC population on the islands, with the government telling Parliament in 2015 that there was none. Furthermore, data from the 2011 Socio-Economic Census has not been made public and the 2021 Census is yet to begin.
