MANGALORE: The Dakshina Kannada district unit of the Karnataka Dalit Sangharsha Samiti (DSS) has urged the State Government to make honest efforts to resolve the problems faced by Dalits rather than resort to what they labelled as "publicity stunts such as staying overnight at the house of a Dalit or eating food bought from hotels at their homes". The samiti has accused the Government of having failed to address the long-pending problems of the community.

Dalit leader P. Keshav told presspersons here on Tuesday that instances such as Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy's staying at Dalit homes and his deputy B.S. Yediyurappa's visiting a Dalit family in Mangalore for breakfast merely served to highlight realities such as casteism, untouchability and the inequalities existing in society. The Government should instead focus on resolving such issues, he said.

Mr. Keshav said successive governments had merely paid lip service to the cause of Dalit empowerment. This was evident from the fact that 59 years after the country's Independence, most Dalits were still not receiving their basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution, such as the right to land, education and employment, he said. Dalits were also being denied political opportunities to grow and all this was being reflected in their social and economic conditions, he added.

Sites

He said that although the "Akrama-Sakrama" scheme had been launched in the late 1990s, successive governments had failed to provide sites to Dalits who did not own land. The Mangalore City Corporation authorities were pleading helplessness in providing sites to Dalits on encroached revenue land within a 10-kilometre radius of the corporation office, he said.

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