SC lists pleas challenging Bihar caste survey for final hearing in September

The Supreme Court on Tuesday posted for September the final hearing on a batch of pleas challenging the Patna High Court order upholding the Bihar governments decision to conduct a caste surveyA bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Sanjay Kumar asked the parties to file written submissions on issues like whether the state has the right to conduct a caste survey and on what conditions and which circumstances such an exercise is barred under lawThe bench told senior advocate Aprajita Singh appearing for petitioners who have challenged the Bihar governments caste survey that their arguments should deal with whether the entire data collected by the state should be available in the public domainSingh said her main point of challenge is that the survey conducted by the state has breached the privacy of individuals as people cannot be forced to disclose their casteIndividual caste survey has been barred by Supreme Courts Indra Sawhney verdict of 1992 she said adding that Bihars survey mandatorily imposed disclosing caste identity on everyoneJustice Khanna told Singh that she has to bear in mind the doctrine of proportionality which is being adopted by the Supreme Court in recent times and deal with the question of whether the executive can conduct this kind of exercise for collection of data on its population and to what extent it is wrongDoctrine of proportionality says actions taken by a public authority should be proportional to the goal it is trying to achieveOn January 2 the top court had asked the Bihar government to put in the public domain the breakup of the caste survey data to enable those aggrieved to challenge the findingsIt had refused to grant any interim relief to the petitioners who have challenged the caste surveyOn October 6 2023 the top court had questioned the Bihar government as to why it published its caste survey dataIt had however refused to restrain the state government from making public further data and said it may examine if the state has the power to conduct such an exerciseThe top court had also issued formal notices on a batch of pleas challenging the August 1 2023 order of the Patna High Court that gave the goahead for the caste survey in BiharIt rejected the petitioners contention that the state government has already published some data preempting a stay They had sought a complete stay on further publication of dataOn October 2 2023 the Nitish Kumar government released the findings of the caste survey a move its detractors claimed was made keeping in mind the 2024 parliamentary electionsKumar was then heading the JDURJDCongress alliance government He later returned to the NDA foldThe data revealed that the OBCs and EBCs constituted a whopping 63 per cent of the states populationThe states total population stood at a little over 1307 crore out of which the Extremely Backward Classes 36 per cent were the largest social segment followed by the Other Backward Classes at 2713 per centThe survey also said the Yadavs an OBC group was the largest caste in terms of population accounting for 1427 per cent of the totalDalits accounted for 1965 per cent of the total population in the state which is also home to nearly 22 lakh 168 per cent people belonging to the Scheduled TribesBesides a plea by NGO Ek Soch Ek Paryas several other petitions have been filed including one by Nalandaresident Akhilesh Kumar who has contended that the notification issued by the state government for the exercise is against the constitutional mandateKumars petition says according to the constitutional mandate only the Union government is empowered to conduct a censusThe high court had said in its 101page verdict We find the action of the state to be perfectly valid initiated with due competence with the legitimate aim of providing development with justiceThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever