SCńREJECTSńMAHA’Sń PLEAńTOńMAKEń PUBLICń2011ńCASTEń CENSUSńDATA

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court Wednesday dismissed a plea filed by the Maharashtra government seeking a direction to the Centre and other authorities to disclose to the state the SocioEconomic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011 raw caste data of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

A bench of Justices A M Khanwilkar and C T Ravikumar noted that affidavit filed by the Centre before it emphatically stated that the data of SECC 2011 is “not accurate” and “unusable”.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre, told the bench that the SECC 2011 data is “absolutely unreliable” as several infirmities were found in it. Senior advocate Shekhar Naphade, appearing for Maharashtra, told the bench that the Centre cannot claim before the top court that the data is full of errors as the government had told a Parliamentary committee that the data was 98.87 per cent error free.

The bench, while rejecting the petition, said the state is at liberty to pursue other remedies available under the law. The Centre had on Tuesday told the apex court that the SECC 2011 is “not” an OBC data and it was not made public as it was found to be “flawed”, and “bound to mislead”.

The government had said that it “fully supports” reservation for OBC but the exercise will have to be in line with the verdict of the Constitution bench which had mentioned triple conditions, including setting up a dedicated commission to conduct a contemporaneous rigorous empirical inquiry into the nature and implications of the backwardness qua local bodies within the state.