Every Possible Effort to be Made for Including Meena Community in ST List: MoS Tribal Affairs Renuka Singh
BHOPAL / Union minister of state for Tribal Affairs Renuka Singh on Thursday said that the central government would make every possible effort to re-include the Meena community in the central list of the Scheduled Tribes (ST) for Madhya Pradesh. She also said that the positive outcome would be surfaced within a year.
MoS Renuka Singh was on a visit to Bhopal to attend a departmental meeting with State’s Tribal Welfare minister Meena Singh and the officials. During her visit to the state capital, she also attended a wedding ceremony.
A delegation of the Meena Samaj Sewa Sangathan under the headship of its president Jagdish Singh Meena submitted a memorandum to the Union Minister Singh demanding the Meena community of the entire Madhya Pradesh would be included in the ST list as Rajasthan state where Meena caste comes in ST.
After receiving the memorandum of demand, the Tribal Affairs Minister Singh held a meeting with the leaders of the Meena community and assured them that she would make every possible effort to include the Meena caste in the ST list. She also emphasized that a positive result would be got soon to the community in this regard. MP minister Meena Singh and BJP’s national spokesperson of Mahila Morcha (Women Wing) Anita Singh were present during the meeting with the Meena community leaders.
The Meena community of Sironj and Lateri Tehsils of MP’s Vidisha district used to include in the ST list since both the tehsils came into the existence in Madhya Pradesh but after 2003 Central government excluded the Meena caste from the list and a gazette notification was released.
Lateri and Sironj were part of the erstwhile Tonk princely state of Rajasthan but after the merger of Indian states in the Republic of India both blocks were become parts of Madhya Pradesh’s Vidisha district. Since then, the community was on the ST list but in 2003 it was removed.
“According to the resolution which was passed by the MP Assembly on 4 March 2016, Meena community of entire state should be included in the ST list”, the memorandum stated. “Meena caste is the sub-caste of the Bhil community. Minas had been considered a tribe community in the 1931 census. At the time of Central India’s princely states, the Mina community of the entire Madhya Pradesh was in the Scheduled Tribes as the released list of castes on 31 March 1949, it was at serial number 95′, the memorandum also said.
Jagdish Singh who is recently elected as the president of the Meena Samaj Sewa Sangthan(MSSS), after the MP High Court directions said that the Meena community basically resides in Rajasthan and they have come to Madhya Pradesh from there, the caste is a sufficed backward. “Neither IAS/IPS officer became from the state so far from the Meena community nor Parliamentarian elected. Leaving a few people, mostly of the caste are agricultural laborers”, Jagdish Singh, consecutively elected second-time chief of MSSS told The Sun Today.
