Even as Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah claims to champion the cause of backward classes and Dalits, his government has silently diverted funds meant for Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe welfare – Rs 11,000 crore – to fulfill Congress’s five major poll guarantees.

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The money is being diverted from the Rs 34,293-crore corpus of Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan and Tribal Sub-Plan (SCSP-TSP), which mandates spending on SC/ST welfare. The Karnataka Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan and Tribal Sub-Plan Act requires the government to spend 24.1% of its total budget on SC/ST welfare.

The five guarantees are likely to cost Rs 52,000 crore in this financial year, according to the budget presented by Siddaramaiah. The government intends to divert Rs 7,700 crore from SC Sub-Plan and Rs 3,430 crore from Tribal Sub-Plan.

There are concerns that this diversion will derail welfare programmes meant for the welfare of SC and ST communities. In the financial year 2022-23, Rs 28,234 crore was allotted for SC and ST Sub-Plans, while in the budget presented just before the elections for financial year 2023-24, then Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai had allocated Rs 30,215 crore for SC/ST Sub-Plan.

The government is trying to justify diversion of funds arguing that the guarantees will have beneficiaries from the SC/ST community as well, but the social welfare minister admitted that there is no data on the number of guarantee beneficiaries from these communities. “We have allocated Rs 7,700 crore under the SCP and Rs 3,430 crore under the TSP, a total of Rs 11,000 crore. We don’t know the statistics of beneficiaries. If it is over and above, the CM has instructed to give back to the social welfare department,” said HC Mahadevappa, Social Welfare Minister.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been quick to latch on to the issue, questioning if this is Siddaramaiah’s concern for marginalised communities. “It is illegal for the government to use the Rs 11,000 crore allocated for special schemes for Scheduled Castes and Tribes to implement guarantee schemes, instead of using it for the prosperity of that society. Real development projects have been stopped due to such gimmicks of the government,” tweeted former BJP Minister Sunil Kumar.

The Congress government’s struggle to get funds for its five guarantees was already under the scanner, with the government going against the finance department’s advice while implementing the Gruha Lakshmi scheme. The department, in June, had told the government that “it’s not possible to provide such enormous amount of funds every year for the Gruha Lakshmi scheme”. This, even as the BJP has expressed its doubts on whether these schemes would continue even after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.