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| Jitendra terms notification of backward area as unconstitutional | | | Early Times Report
Jammu, Jan 7: Castigating the coalition government for arbitrarily declaring 45 villages as backward, Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) chief spokesperson Dr. Jitendra Singh today termed the notification as unconstitutional and said that notification was liable to be challenged in the court of law.
The issue goes beyond the controversy of having only 17 out of 45 villages from Jammu and that too 16 out of 17 of them from constituencies of sitting Congress ministers, he pointed out.
Dr Jitendra Singh went on to explain that a village is to be declared backward by the government only on the recommendations of the State Commission for Backward Classes (SCBC) after the latter has assessed its development scenario on the basis of 52 indicators including progress in social sectors like health, education and accessibility.
While the backward areas receive special attention on developmental front and get a special quota of government jobs and other benefits, the J&K State Commission for Backward Classes Act makes it mandatory for the Government to undertake the revision of backward villages after every 10 years to exclude such areas from the list which have grown forward on developmental graph, he said.
This means that whenever an exercise like this is undertaken, it is meant not only to include such areas which had been left un-included during earlier exercise but also to "exclude" from the list such areas which could have been backward earlier but are no longer backward now as per the criterion mentioned above, he added.
A glaring contradiction, cited by Dr Jitendra Singh, is that some villages which were declared backward as early as in 1975, continue to enjoy the same status and privileges even today since there was no re-evaluation of their status undertaken for the next 30 years or so.
This amounts to gross violation of the very concept of providing special privileges to genuinely backward areas at any given time till the time these areas develop to a certain level comparable to more developed areas of the State, he said.
Unfortunately, Dr Jitendra Singh said, from time to time, those in the ministry have flouted the norms to push in areas from their respective constituencies for the privileged status under the "backward" category and suggested that one remedy to this could be to make the Commission for Backward Classes an autonomous independent body, not subject to any control or final decision by the ministry or the government. |
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