Mumbai: The Maharashtra State Backward Class Commission (MSBCC) has arbitrarily and erroneously calculated data, which it collected after surveying over 40,000 families of the Maratha community, the Bombay High Court was told on Thursday. The HC was further informed that the MSBCC, in its report, recommending reservation to Marathas, has conveniently excluded data on several parameters in its final report.
The contentions were raised by senior counsel Pradeep Sancheti, appearing for petitioner Sanjeet Shukla, who has challenged the decision of the Maharashtra government to grant 16 per cent reservation to Marathas in public service and educational institutions.
A division bench of Justices Ranjit More and Bharati Dangre is seized with a bunch of petitions challenging the reservation to Marathas and is presently hearing the final arguments in the matter. On Thursday, when the matter was taken up for hearing, Sancheti poked holes in the MSBCC report.
Sancheti said, “The commission relied on the survey results of a small sample size, which was just around 43,000 people from the Maratha community. Thus, its findings did not reflect the condition or social status of the entire community.” The report at one place says that 85.8 per cent of Maratha males are engaged in physical labour, which is more than the state average of 69.9 per cent. This data is arbitrary.
If based on such arbitrary data, the Maratha community can be labelled socially backward, then the same should be done for other communities,” Sancheti argued. Sancheti further claimed the report erroneously provided data on the Below Poverty Line (BPL) aspect. “The commission, after relying on the Economic Survey of Maharashtra, has concluded that 24.4 per cent population of the state is BPL. But the data in Economic Survey of Maharashtra contains the ration card data, and not BPL data,” Sancheti pointed out.
“The report says that the commission framed the questionnaire in consultation with a group of social scientists but it did not even consider many parameters in its questionnaire and for which they collected their data for final marking. These parameters were not assigned any marks and left out as if this data was not collected at all,” Sanceti added.
According to Sancheti, the MSBCC picked and chose the parameters and “conveniently left out many of the parameters where the Maratha community is better off,” he said. “Thus, the commission ignored the parameters which they claimed to have designed in consultation with experts. This shows that the commission did not have pre-defined criteria before collecting the data,” Sancheti argued. Sancheti is expected to continue his arguments in the matter on Friday.
