Mangalore, March 17: There is need for social consciousness and collective struggle on part of the members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribe communities to achieve their emancipation. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribe communities should learn to assert their rights. They should utilise the tools such as Right to Information Act to achieve this end, Karnataka State Executive Committee member of Communist Party of India (Marxist) Maruthi Manpade has said.

Inaugurating the ‘Dalit Development Convention’, organised by the city committee of CPI (M) here on Sunday, Mr. Manpade, also the State convener of “Jathi Daurjanya Virodhi Samiti”, said: “The state of members of these communities is pitiable even after 60 years of Independence. The ruling class has made little effort to eradicate caste system and it has fostered the system for narrow political gains,” he said.

Mr. Manpade claimed that there was a fair degree of success in this regard in Left-ruled States such as West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala. Karnataka, under the then Chief Minister Devaraj Urs, tried to help their cause by ushering in the Land Reforms Act. However, people from the SC/ST community failed to take advantage of it and continued to live a life of abject penury and neglect, he said.

Referring to the official human development index of the district, Mr. Manpade said while it was 0.742 for Dakshina Kannada as a whole, it was a mere 0.575 in case of SC/ST community. “We are more than two decades behind in terms of development in the district. This gap is more pronounced in the field of education, especially among women. Such social inequalities often go unquestioned,” he said.

The State had witnessed 3.75 lakh cases of atrocity against people from SC/ST communities in the last 16 years. More than 1.25 lakh SC/STs had been killed during the period, including the infamous Kambalapalli incident. The conviction rate in these cases was two per cent.

The only area where the mandatory 18 per cent reservation for SCs/STs had been met was in the Group-D jobs. With the private sector remaining hostile to the idea of providing job reservations to SCs and STs, and the political parties, especially those owing allegiance to Sangh Parivar paying lip sympathy to the cause, the need of the hour was collective assertion of rights by these communities, he said.

Hindu