The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Inclusion of more castes in BC list opposed

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Thursday, Jul 10, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Inclusion of more castes in BC list opposed

Staff Reporter

Raise in quota for BCs to 44 per cent demanded

Kakinada: BC Ikya Sangharshana Samiti State president VGR Naragoni objected to the proposed inclusion of 20 more sub-castes in the list of Backward Classes (BCs), stating that more number of BCs would have to compete for the existing reservation of 25 percent.

The BC Commission should either increase the reservation to 44 percent or stop further expansion of the BC list which has 94 sub-castes originally.

Addressing a press conference here on Wednesday, Mr. Naragoni said it was only a few days ago that the government added 12 sub-castes to the BC list and it requested the BC Commission to take the total number to 126 without raising the quota. The governments of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka were providing 68 and 67 percent reservations respectively for the BCs.

The State government should also raise reservations to 44 per cent if it wanted to add more sub-castes to the BC list. Then only justice would be done to the BCs who were already constrained for opportunities, he said.

Mr. Naragoni demanded that the Congress should declare the number of Assembly seats for which it was prepared to field BC candidates in the elections to be held next year.

The TDP has committed itself to allot 33 percent of the seats for BCs but the Congress appears to be not serious about its talk of politically empowering them.

The BCs were not averse to lending issue-based support to actor Chiranjeevi’s party and forging an electoral alliance with it in the event of framing of policies aimed at BCs’ welfare,

Mr. Naragoni said and welcomed reports that Chiranjeevi was in favour of allocating 40 percent of seats for BCs.

BC leaders B Satyanarayana, P Venkateswara Rao, N Satyanarayana and G Srinivas were present.

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