Ahmedabad budget for Dalits should be in proportion to its population in the city: Dalit rights leader

Taking strong exception to the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) “failing” to allocate budgetary funds for the Dalits in proportion to its population in the city, senior activist Kantilal Parmar, in a representation to Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani has demanded that the scheduled caste (SC) sub-plan should be implemented in Ahmedabad. Ahmedabad’s Dalit population is approximately 14%, as against less than 7% of the state as a whole.
Parma, in a letter to Rupani, said, there should be a monitoring committee which must ensure that the SC sub-plan is properly implemented. As the same, Parmar insisted, the city’s MLAs and MPs should ensure spending their funds for popular schemes for the Dalits in their areas in accordance with the Dalit proportion of the population of their constituencies. While MPs get an annual fund of Rs 5 crore, MLAs get a fund of Rs 1.5 crore for implementing popular schemes.
Even as demanding housing facilities to Dalit localities, especially where the community’s population is more than 3,000, Parmar said in the letter, the collapse of the building in Odhav because of poor housing construction under the Indira Awas Yojana has led the authorities to vacate those who had been living in there. “While the person who died as a result should be given a compensation of Rs 1 crore, others should be swiftly rehabilitated”, he insisted, demanding those responsible for poor construction should be booked under IPC 304.

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