State to send draft proposal to central govt for notifying 18 OBCs as scheduled castes’

After the Allahabad High Court quashed two orders of the Uttar Pradesh government notifying 17 sub-castes of Other Backward Classes (OBC) as Schedule Castes (SC), the state BJP government is planning to send a proposal to the Centre, asking it to pass a law in Parliament to include those 17 OBC sub-castes into the Scheduled Castes list.

At present, there are 66 castes on the Schedule Castes list in Uttar Pradesh.

While quashing the two government notifications – one brought by the Samajwadi Party government in 2016 and the other by the BJP government in 2019 – the High Court had said that only Parliament has the power to add new castes to the Scheduled Castes list.