NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday junked the Maharashtra government's plea for directions to Centre to give it raw census data on the Other Backward Castes (OBCs), after the Centre took the stand that the data is flawed and cannot be relied upon.
The two-judge Bench also asked the Maharashtra government and the state election commission to re-notify the 27% seats reserved for the OBCs as general seats in the local body elections.
The court also said that the results for all the general seats, including the 27% that will now be re-notified, should be declared on the same day. The Maharashtra Election Commission should release the new notification within a day, the court said.
It held that the census data on OBCs cannot be made public when the Centre has maintained in its affidavit that the data is unusable, inaccurate and full of infirmities. In view of the Centre's stand, the court cannot entertain the state government's petition.
Senior advocate Shekhar Naphade, appearing for Maharashtra, challenged the Centre's claim that the data is full of errors when the government had told a Parliamentary committee that the data was 98.87% error-free.
In an affidavit in September, the Centre had contended that the caste census of the OBCs was administratively difficult and cumbersome and hence it was excluded from the purview of census as a "conscious policy decision."
The Maharashtra Assembly had in July passed a resolution that it will approach the Centre for the 2011 Census data, so that the state Backward Class Commission could prepare empirical data on the OBC population.
The Apex Court also rejected the state government's plea to stop the local body elections entirely and give the state election commission three months to finish the data collection procedure required for reservation under the OBC category.
In the previous hearing on December 6, the court had put on hold the elections to the seats reserved for the OBCs, saying that the decision to provide quota was taken without the Supreme Court-mandated triple test.
