The Chhattisgarh government on Tuesday announced the formation of separate advisory councils for Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes in the State. Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel said that the move aimed at providing help in recommending and implementing programmes for these groups.
The move assumes significance for its timing as the Assembly election is just 14 months away and the fact that it comes when the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party is attempting to woo back the Other Backward Class (OBC) voters.
While a tribal advisory council has been in existence since 2001, this is the first time such bodies have been formed for SCs and OBCs in the State.
The Chief Minister will be the president of both the councils while the Minister in charge will be the vice-president. Whereas the OBC council will have 40 members, the SC council will have 20. A fourth (10 in the OBC council and five in the SC council) of the members in each body will comprise elected members.
Numerically, between them, the SC (13) and OBC (47) communities comprise 60% of the votes. In the 90-member Assembly, 29 seats are reserved for STs and another 10 for the SCs.
In the remaining 51 unreserved seats, the OBC vote is influential. It is from this community that Mr. Baghel comes. The BJP, too, has recently appointed a new State president and Leader of Opposition who both come from the OBC community. Party national president J.P. Nadda is scheduled to come to Raipur later this week and is expected to discuss the fine-tuning of this new outreach initiative, among other things.
