Maharashtra Assembly Elections 2024 | Ahead of polls, govt takes 38 decisions
Mumbai: Days before the announcement of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly elections, the BJP-led Maha Yuti government took 38 decisions on Monday including accepting the second and third report of Justice Shinde Committee vis-a-vis the Maratha reservation issue.
The series of decisions were taken at a Cabinet meeting presided over by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and attended by Deputy Chief Ministers Devendra Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar and their ministerial colleagues.
On September 7, 2023, the Maharashtra government set up a committee of Justice Sandeep Shinde (Retd) to find record entries of Maratha Kunbi and Kunbi Maratha and to formulate procedures to issue certificates, which would enable them to avail reservation under OBC category. The first report of the Shinde Committee was submitted on October 7, 2023, which was accepted by the government on 31 October, 2023. On December 18, 2023, the Shinde Committee submitted its second report, which was pending before the government. Now, the second and third report has been accepted by the government together.
The acceptance of the Shinde panel report by the state cabinet on Monday is seen as a significant move to placate Maratha reservation campaigner Manoj Jarange-Patil, who has been demanding that the government declare all Marathas as Kunbis and give reservation as OBCs. During the course of one year, the Shinde Committee scrutinised records of several lakh pages, visited Hyderabad to obtain Nizam-era records and also checked the archaeological records in Maharashtra. The State government has opened two routes for Maratha reservation – as Maratha-Kunbi and Kunbi-Maratha under OBCs the the Maharashtra State Reservation for Socially and Educationally Backward Bill, 2024, was passed in the state legislature, paving the way for 10 per cent reservation. However, Jarange-Patil is insisting on implementation of draft notification of ‘sage-soyare’, a Marathi term for ‘relatives from the family tree’, which widens the scope of the quota and withdrawal of cases against the agitators.