Mumbai: As Maratha quota activist Manoj Jarange called off his 11th agitation on the issue of granting Kunbi (OBC) certificates to the community, official data shows there has already been a dramatic rise in the issuing of these certificates in the Marathwada region since the agitation began three years ago.
The number of Kunbi caste certificates issued to Marathas in the Marathwada region has soared from 652 to 3.1 lakh between Oct 2023 and Sept 7 this year, official data reveals. By contrast, the state had issued only 652 Kunbi certificates to Marathas in almost 40 years between 1986 and Oct 2023, when the Justice Shinde committee was formed to oversee the issue after Jarange’s protest.
Maratha activists said the bottlenecks in the caste validation process make it difficult for them to access the Kunbi (OBC) quota. We need the caste validity committee to make discretionary decisions based on the village-level information of the family’s antecedents,” said Virendra Pawar from the Sakal Maratha Samaj. Marathwada is the epicentre of his agitation. “Since the agitation began three years ago, the number of Kunbi certificates issued to Marathas have undoubtedly gone up. But those in Marathwada face the challenge of accessing records of their family tree since this was not properly documented in the Hyderabad state.
Also, historically, Vidarbha and North Maharashtra benefited from Punjabrao Deshmukh’s agitation in the 1960s for the Maratha agrarian community in those regions to be registered as Kunbis (OBCs) in order to avail of quota benefits.