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Train services in Mayurbhanj district were severely disrupted on Tuesday as members of Kudumi community staged rail roko agitations at various stations demanding Scheduled Tribe (ST) status for their community.
Hundreds of agitators from the community joined the protest and sat on the railway tracks and demanded the status of ST. The agitations were seen at Baripada, Rairangpur and Betnoti railway stations.
Bangiriposi-Bhubaneswar Superfast Train and Baripada-Shalimar train remained halted midway due to the protests.
As per sources, the community has been excluded from scheduled tribe list in 1950 and listed under other backward caste (OBC) category.
“We still do not know why the government dropped us from the ST category. We demand re-inclusion of our community in the ST list,” a protestor said.
Over 25 lakh people belonging to the Kudumi community reside in the districts of Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal. In Odisha, they are mostly from Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Balasore, Angul, Jajpur, Sundargarh and Sambalpur.
A delegation of the Kudumi leaders had also earlier met Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and urged him to take up the issue with the Centre.
A few days back, CM Naveen Patnaik had written to Union Tribal Affairs Minister Arjun Munda seeking inclusion of 160 communities in the ST list.
Since 1978 onwards, the Odisha government has recommended more than 160 communities of the state to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs for their inclusion in the ST list of the state with the approval of Tribes Advisory Council, Patnaik said.
The CM said that these communities are being deprived of the benefits availed by STs though they have the same tribal characteristics as their respective notified STs.
He also pointed out that the task force under the Ministry of Tribal Affairs had recommended 9 proposals from Odisha as priority cases for inclusion in the ST list of the state in 2014. However, the same is yet to be notified in the Presidential Order," said Patnaik.
Because of the delay in their inclusion in the ST list, all these 160-plus communities of the state are becoming victims of historical injustice, he added.
He requested Munda to look into this long pending matter and expedite the scheduling of these left-out communities to deliver social justice to them in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution of India.
This will go a long way in helping these deprived communities by giving them their much-needed recognition as ST and ensure social justice, he added.
