SC asks Patna HC to decide plea against caste survey ‘in three days’
The court was hearing an appeal filed by an organisation, Youth For Equality, which had approached the high court on April 18 to stay the survey.
The Supreme Court on Friday told the Patna high court to immediately take a call on petitions seeking stay of the caste-based survey in the state and decide the matter preferably within three days, even as it was sought to know why the Bihar government was labouring so hard to gather caste data by undertaking a door-to-door survey.
With the survey entering the second phase and expected to conclude by May 15, a bench of justices MR Shah and JB Pardiwala said, “It is not in dispute that the matters are pending before the high court (of Patna). It appears that as on date, there is no decision by the high court even on grant of interim order.”
The court was hearing an appeal filed by an organisation, Youth For Equality, which had approached the high court on April 18 to stay the survey. The HC posted the matter for hearing on May 4 without passing any order. Against this order, the organisation approached the top court.
The SC allowed the petitioner to make an application for stay before the high court while requesting that the same be considered and finally decided “at the earliest”, preferably within three days from the mentioning of the application before the chief justice of the high court.
The SC bench also asked the Bihar government the purpose of the exercise. “This survey is being undertaken for what purpose? Is it for electoral roll? Why are you working so hard on this exercise?”
State’s standing counsel Manish Kumar told the court that the survey was imperative and need to be carried out as this exercise had not been done for a long time.
Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the petitioner, said that the HC order will make their petition redundant as the survey will end by May 15. He said such a survey is totally illegal and several petitions have challenged it as it is a “burning issue” in the state.
It was in June last year the state government decided to conduct a door-to-door caste census. In January, a petition challenging this survey was filed in the top court which felt that the same should be filed before the high court. The survey was opposed on the ground that this was not meant to be a sample survey but a census which only Centre can conduct under Section 3 of the Census Act, 1948 and the accompanying Census Rules.
The Youth for Equality further claimed that such a survey had no legal backing and was conducted on an executive order issued by the state. It further claimed that the census required every household to disclose sensitive personal details such as religion, caste, income which constitute privileged information of citizens under the right to privacy, declared a fundamental right by Supreme Court under Article 21.
The petitions before the HC further questioned the estimated expenditure for the survey estimated to be ₹500 crore to be spent out of the Contingency Fund maintained by state which is meant to cater to unforeseen expenditure. Even the state’s annual budget failed to carve out any spending on this account which made the petitioners all the more suspicious about the government’s intention to conduct the survey.