List BC Voters in 3 Months: Telangana HC
HYDERABAD: The Telangana High Court gave the government three months to complete the contemporaneous empirical inquiry to identify political backwardness classes of citizens and enumeration of Backward Classes voters in every local body situated in Telangana.
A division bench comprising Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice J. Sreenivas Rao on Tuesday directed Advocate-General A. Sudershan Reddy to implement the directions contained in para 13 of the judgment of the Supreme Court in ‘Vikas Kishanrao Gawali v State of Maharashtra’, within three months from Tuesday, and submit a compliance report.
In ‘Vikas Kishanrao Gawali’, the Supreme Court had issued guidelines for fixing OBC reservations in local body elections and specified a triple test for reserving seats in the local bodies for OBCs. This had not been done so far in the state.
The conditions of triple test are: set up a dedicated commission to conduct contemporaneous rigorous empirical inquiry into the nature and implications of the backwardness qua local bodies; specify the proportion of reservation required to be provisioned local body-wise in light of recommendations of the commission; and that the reservation shall not exceed aggregate of 50 per cent of the total seats reserved in favour of SC, ST and OBC communities taken together.
The High Court was dealing with the three petitions filed in 2018 and 2019 by Jajula Srinivas Goud, Dasoju Sravan Kumar and others, who challenged the continuation of the then local body election process without undertaking the exercise of identifying politically backward class of citizens afresh in terms of the judgment of the Supreme Court in ‘K. Krishnamurthy v Union of India.’
During the previous hearing, in the first week of August, counsels for the petitioner submitted to the court that the Supreme Court had issued fresh orders in 2021 setting the triple test for OBC reservations in ‘Vikas Kishanrao Gawali’ and submitted that the petitioners would be satisfied if the directions contained in paragraph 13 of that judgment were complied with.
Noting the same, the High Court on August 6 had directed Advocate General to apprise the time the government required to comply with the Supreme Court orders. Following the orders, the AG on Tuesday submitted to the court that the government required three to four months.