Over 1000 citizens including Members of Parliament (MPs) from Tamil Nadu like Thol Thirumavalavan, D Ravikumar, S Jothimani and Manickam Tagore have issued a statement against the denial of seats for OBC students in the All-India Medical admissions. The signatories accused the central government of not following its own policy of 27 percent reservation for the OBCs resulting in the community getting "robbed of 10,000 seats in the last three years".
In their statement, the signatories mention that as per the admission process, private and government colleges are required to surrender 15 percent of their seats in the undergraduate courses to a common central pool called the All India Quota. For postgraduate courses, 50 percent of the sears are allocated.
The statement threw light on how the OBCs had been blatantly denied their seats, "In 2017-18, only 69 seats (1.7%) out of a total of 4,064 seats were reserved for the OBCs in the undergraduate programmes like MBBS and BDS while, as per the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006, OBC candidates should have received 27%, that is, 1,097 seats." Speaking about how the injustice carried on to the following year, the signatories pointed out that only 220 OBC candidates were admitted to PG courses when they had a claim over 2152 of the 7982 seats. "Similarly, only 66 OBC students were admitted under All India Quota to the MBBS programme. There were 4,061 All India Quota MBBS seats, of which 27 per cent (1,096) should have been filled with OBC candidates," they wrote.
Accusing the central government of robbing the OBCs of 10,000 seats in the last three years, the statement pointed to the failure of the government to follow its own policy of 27 percent reservation. They also pointed out that the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had been able to promptly increase the MBBS seats when reservation for the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) when it was announced. "After the reservation for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) came into force in 2019, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had promptly increased 5,200 MBBS seats for the academic year 2019-20 to accommodate the new category. The ministry needs to show the same promptness towards OBC reservation," they added.
The signatories had three demands for the government - that the seats taken from private and state government colleges should be brought under the purview of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006 and implement the 27 percent OBC reservation starting from the upcoming year. Secondly, the statement demands the health ministry to publish year-wise data on the number of seats allocated into the OBCs in UG and PG courses since the Act came into force. "The ministry should also compensate for all the seats the OBCs have lost so far by allocating extra seats to OBCs in the upcoming round," the signatories said.
Some of the other signatories on the statement includes writer Meena Kandasamy, MLA Jignesh Mevani, student leader Umar Khalid, DU professor, Hany Babu, JNU's student group, BAPSA, Gurmehar Kaur, G Karunanidhy of the AIOBC Federation and various other students, activists, academicians and people from various walks of life. The citizens all agree that the denial of reservation to the OBCs is a 'blatant violation of the Indian Constitution."The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare should correct this wrong done towards the OBCs at the earliest," they urged.
