Mumbai: Greater than 300 folks at work in each taluka, a excessive demand for Modi script translators, a prototype of how the phrase “Kunbi” will be written in several methods in several scripts and, in some circumstances, district degree officers going village to village to map household bushes.
This, in a nutshell, sums up what’s occurring on the floor degree because the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra authorities scrambles to finish the identification of all Marathas who as soon as belonged to the Kunbi caste earlier than the two January deadline for his or her quota.
Leaders of the Maratha group say that each one Marathas have their roots within the agrarian Kunbi clan and must be given reservation in authorities jobs and schooling as Kunbis underneath the Different Backward Courses (OBC) class.
A separate quota for Marathas is embroiled in a court docket battle, with the Supreme Court docket having struck it down in 2021, calling it “unconstitutional”. The state authorities has filed a healing petition.
Maratha group activist Manoj Jarange Patil, who has been main the most recent wave of protests for a Maratha quota, has given the state authorities time till 2 January to determine all Marathas whose ancestors had Kunbi paperwork, and grant them the caste certificates.
“Because there is not much time, there is almost a competition going on between districts on who completes the exercise of identifying Kunbis faster. As a result, the whole process has gathered speed,” Ayush Prasad, district collector, Jalgaon, mentioned to ThePrint.
He added that in each taluka, there are 300-400 authorities officers concerned within the means of figuring out Kunbis. “We have 15 talukas, so in our district about 4,500 people are involved in this activity,” he defined.
The Maharashtra authorities has directed all districts to scour several types of paperwork associated to their areas — faculty information, land information, delivery and demise information, crime information and so forth. The districts should determine Kunbi references throughout these paperwork and publish them within the public area.
Officers mentioned the state authorities has given district workplaces the “deadline of 30 November” to finish this activity.
Publish that, folks will likely be urged to undergo these Kunbi references discovered, present the household family tree and submit claims for caste certificates, officers throughout districts informed ThePrint.
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Brittle paperwork
For nearly all districts in Maharashtra, income information are absolutely digitised. However district officers should scan far more than simply income information, and in lots of circumstances the information are centuries-old brittle papers.
“They are old, torn and tattered and some crumble at the slightest touch,” mentioned Deepa Mudhol Munde, collector of Beed district within the Marathwada area, whereas talking to ThePrint.
She cited just a few different challenges — no final names on information, information of siblings the place one’s caste says Kunbi and the opposite’s says Maratha, and so forth.
“The talathis (officer of revenue department at the taluka-level) are tallying records as and how we find them. If we find more records bunched in a particular village, the local talathi visits and literally draws family trees to ascertain the origin of families living in those villages and how they might be linked to the Kunbi records found in our documents. Those making Kunbi claims now are the fourth or fifth generation of the original Kunbi record-holder in their families,” Munde mentioned, including that her district had to this point discovered 4,210 Kunbi information.
The subsequent step, she mentioned, is to arrange camps in villages with a lot of Kunbi information for folks to return ahead with their Kunbi claims and family tree, and grant caste certificates to complete households.
“For now, translating and displaying the documents is a big task,” she mentioned.
The Jalgaon district gave an order for the acquisition of normal scanners and quick scanners to shortly digitise Kunbi information discovered by workers and show them on-line. However officers quickly discovered that the scanners have been of little use. The paperwork have been too outdated and the paper was too skinny.
“We came up with an alternative. The talathis started scanning documents on their smartphone cameras. (But) this was turning out to be terrabytes of data and time-consuming to upload,” mentioned Archana Extra, deputy collector of Jalgaon district, who’s the purpose of contact for all tehsildars within the district.
The district then got here up with one other brainwave. Officers opened Gmail accounts of their names and bought additional storage on Google Drive.
“Here too, there was a slight hiccup. The extra storage could only be purchased using credit cards and not everyone had them. So, we had to ask a few designated officials to make the purchase,” district collector Prasad mentioned.
The Jalgaon district has searched 22 lakh information till now and located shut to 1 lakh Kunbi references. Nevertheless, a few of these could possibly be repetitions and will likely be weeded out, officers mentioned.
Totally different scripts
District-level officers ThePrint spoke to additionally mentioned the information that present Kunbi lineage are scattered throughout 4 completely different scripts relying on the time once they have been created.
Some, courting again to the British period, are within the Roman script. Some, from the Nizam rule, are in Urdu. Many pre-1900 information are within the Modi script, whereas some recorded within the 1900s are within the Devanagari script.
So, the very first thing that each one district officers did was to rearrange for Modi script readers and translators.
“We asked our Modi readers to give us all the possible ways in which the records might state that the identity of a person is Kunbi,” S. Salimath, district collector of Ahmednagar, informed ThePrint.
A number of districts have adopted the identical strategy. In line with the Modi translations that ThePrint has accessed, the phrase “Kunbi” is present in at the very least 4 completely different codecs throughout paperwork.
“We gave this sample to all our employees going through pages and pages of government records. The ones that they prima facie flag as Kunbi, we send to our translator and then it is certified. The Modi script records are mostly those that were created prior to 1930. Post that, there are records in the Devanagari script,” Salimath mentioned.
He added that the Ahmednagar district has already come throughout 60,000 Kunbi information.
Pune collector Rajesh Deshmukh mentioned he had a barely simpler job. His district has allotted 32,000 Kunbi caste certificates within the final 5 years, so officers are acquainted with the method.
“No doubt this is a mammoth task, but the system is already in place. We have already found 60-70 Modi script readers,” Deshmukh informed ThePrint.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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