In the backdrop of recent incidents provoking Dalit violence in Maharashtra and reports of atrocities against them, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called a meeting of the chief ministers of all states to discuss the issue on December 9.
In an agenda sent to all the state chief ministers, the prime minister expressed unhappiness over the crime against Dalits and the administration’s “indifference” to them.
The prime minister also wants to take stock of the implementation of various welfare schemes for the Dalits and the tribals. The state governments will be asked to report on the action taken to check atrocities against the Dalits.
The discussions, to held in an inter-state council meeting, will follow the National Development Council meeting, scheduled for the same day.
Officials said the SC/ST welfare schemes were also expected to be taken up at the development council meeting, where the Planning Commission plans to introduce new proposals to improve their lot.
The meeting is significant in the wake of the violence in Nasik and other parts of Maharashtra after the desecration of the statue of Dr BR Ambedkar. Three people died and public property worth crores was torched.
Two months ago, the state was rocked by another spate of Dalit violence, after four of a Dalit family — including two women — were killed. Similar, incidents have also been reported from other states.
In May, a Dalit village in Haryana’s Karnal district flared up, when the community defied police orders to take out a procession of Ravidas Jayanti. A deluge of complaints is pending with the National Commission for Schedule Castes and Tribes because of the government’s failure to enforce the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. Many states are yet to appoint vigilance and monitoring committees that the law stipulates.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
