BJP’s new lie in Tamil Nadu. 14% of people are eligible for 10% EWS !

Claim

Rating

Explanation

Selvakumar, Tamil Nadu BJP’s State Vice President for Industrial Cell has made a Twitter post that claims that Brahmins are not the only ones that did not have a reservation before the EWS Quota was introduced.  14% of the people in Tamil Nadu belong to Foreward Castes which do not have any reservation. So, the reservation is for those 14% comes from the Economically Weaker Section reservation which is set at 10%. To make this claim, Selvakumar claims the following as the caste composition of the Tamil Nadu population.

Backward Communities -67 %

Scheduled Castes – 18%

Scheduled Tribes – 1%

Foreward Castes – 14% (including 50+ castes)

What’s the truth?

We tried to verify the caste composition of Tamil Nadu which Selvakumar claimed but no such data is available. It should be noted that the census along with citizens’ caste has not been taken for decades. So, TN BJP’s Selva Kumar has no evidence to back his claim for his caste composition.

Moreover, the reservation policy followed in Tamil Nadu has 30% for Backward communities which includes 3.5% reservation for Muslims (BCM), 20% for Most Backward Communities and Denotified Communities, 18% for Scheduled castes (SC 15% + SCA 3% = 18%) and  1% for the Scheduled Tribes. So, Tamil Nadu has 69% reservation, in total, and 31% in Open Competition.

The Union Government has brought the Economically Weaker Section reservation on January 2019 by making amendments to Articles 15 and 16 of the Indian Constitution. It came with a few rules as well which include, that the beneficiaries should not have any reservation benefits from OBC (BC+MBC), SC or ST categories. EWS rules also include that the beneficiary family’s annual income should not exceed Rs.8 lakhs, should not have land more than 5 acres, and should not have land more than 1000 square feet of they own a house.

Selvakumar’s post lists a few castes while claiming that more than 50 communities will benefit from EWS reservation . But the list includes Reddiyar, Pandiya Vellalar who have a reservation in the BC category and Kongu Chettiyar who have a reservation in the MBC category. These castes will not be eligible for reservation as per Union Government’s EWS.

It should be noted that various leaders in India including Lalu Prasad Yadav, M.Karunanidhi, Ramadoss, Nitish Kumar, and Veerappa Moily have been in favour of caste-based census.

We were able to analyze a reply to an RTI request made in 2017 which was made to find out the caste composition of students appearing for the 10th Board Exams in Tamil Nadu.

According to the RTI requests’ reply, a total of 9,27,657 students appeared for the 10th Board Exams, whereas, only 24,955 of the students (2.7%) belonged to the Open Competition which also sometimes has students from Foreward Communities and also students from other communities who choose to not avail reservation by choice or by circumstances. If we compare this with Tamil Nadu’s reservation policy, 97% of the students from backward communities have a reservation of only 69%. On the other hand, less than 3% of Open Competition students which sometimes even include students from other communities, have access to 31% of seats in Open Competition.

If Tamil Nadu accepts 10% EWS reservation, it would effectively mean that 2.7% of people will have a reservation of 10% and 97% of the people will have only 69% reservation.

Note: in the lack of caste census, 10th standard students’ caste composition can be taken as a benchmark to approximately get an idea of the general population’s caste composition as Tamil Nadu has one of the highest Gross Enrolment Ratio for school education in the country.

Conclusion

In our search, we find that some castes mentioned in the list provided by TN BJP’s Selva Kumar are already in BC and MBC categories.  Moreover, the caste census has not been conducted for many years and thus, the data provided by Selva Kumar has no evidence for his claim.

Proof Links