Goemkarponn desk
PANAJI: Union Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment of India Ramdas Athavale today said that ST reservation in Goa Assembly is not possible due to less ST population in the state.
“ST reservation is impossible in Goa. The number of STs should be large to reserve seats in Goa. But in Goa this amount is very less,” said Athavale.
He further said that as far as the census is concerned, this number is not enough to reserve seats for STs.
“As of now, we come to know the numbers for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in our census, but we don’t know the numbers for OBCs and other general castes. I am part of the government and my party supports caste census,” he added.
The Union Minister said that there are technical difficulties involved in the exercise and our Constitution has destroyed the caste system.
*So the technical difficulty is how do we carry out a caste census when we have demolished the caste system” he added.
The Goa Legislative Assembly had unanimously adopted a private member resolution to make provision for political reservation in the Assembly for members from the Scheduled Tribes (ST) community in the state.
The resolution had been moved by Scheduled Tribes’ leader MLA Dr Ganesh Gaonkar, on Friday, July 21. The members of the ST community in Goa have been voicing their demand for political reservation for the last two decades.
They had also said that they would boycott the 2024 Lok Sabha elections if reservation is not declared before polls, and had also held a daylong hunger strike at Lohia Maidan in May this year.
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