The Bihar Assembly on Thursday unanimously passed a bill to increase caste-based reservations in education and government jobs from 50% to 65%, crossing the ceiling set by the Supreme Court.
This comes three days after CM proposed the hike after releasing a full report on the caste census in the Assembly.
The bill now needs the approval of the governor to become a law.
According to the bill, Scheduled Castes will get a reservation of 20%, up from 16%, while the quota for Scheduled Tribes has been doubled from 1% to 2%. Other Backward Classes will get 15% reservation, up from 12%.
For Extremely Backward Classes, the quota will raised from 18% to 25%.
Since another 10% Economically Weaker Sections quota is effective under a different Act, it will not be a part of the current bill, Bihar government said.
With the 10% reservations, the total quota limit in the state will increase to 75% now.
According to the report of caste-survey, 36 per cent of the Bihar’s 13.1 crore people are from EBCs and 27.1 per cent are from Backward Classes. Of the rest, 19.7 per cent are from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes make up 1.7 per cent of the population. The General Category accounts for 15.5 per cent of the population, the report said. This means that over 60 per cent of Bihar hails from OBCs or EBCs.
The report underlines the electoral importance of OBCs and marginalised communities – both for the BJP, which has opposed calls for a national caste census, and the opposition, which has been increasingly more and more vocal on the issue.
