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This is an archive article published on December 17, 2023

Maratha quota: Shinde-Fadnavis govt won’t get an extra hour after Dec 24, we will launch our stir, Jarange Patil warns

Allaying the OBC community’s fear that the Maratha quota will impact their reservation, Manoj Jarange Patil said there was no question of the OBC quota being affected.

manoj patil shinde govtMaratha quota activist Manoj Jarange Patil. (File)

In a stern warning to the Shinde-Fadnavis government, activist Manoj Jarange Patil Sunday said the Maharashtra government should pass a law granting reservation for Marathas by December 24 or face the next round of agitation.

“We are expecting Maratha reservation by December 24. We are confident we will get reservation by that date. The government should pass a law in this regard before December 24. If it does not, the government will not even get one extra hour. We will agitate peacefully,” the activist said at a meeting in Antarwali-Sarati in Jalna where Maratha volunteers, experts, intellectuals and historians from across the state had gathered to decide the future course of the protest.

“…I have consulted the community which has asked me to take a call (on the way forward) on December 23. The chief minister will also speak to me tomorrow (Monday)… We will wait and see what the government does by December 23 when we will decide about our agitation from December 24,” the activist explained.

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Jarange Patil said Maharashtra minister Girish Mahajan met him on Saturday and urged to extend the December 24 deadline. “I told him there will be no more extensions… December 24 is the final date by which the government has to provide us reservation. This is the date which the government had given. The government delegation which met me when I was fasting had promised that reservation would be provided by December 24,” he said.

Allaying the OBC community’s fear that the Maratha quota will impact their reservation, Jarange Patil said there was no question of the OBC quota being affected. “We are already in the OBC category. How can their quota get affected when we are already present in the OBC category,” he said.

He also demanded that the government should immediately resume giving Kunbi certificates. “In some places, the process has stopped and therefore I urge the government to restart the process of issuing Kunbi certificates to those people whose records have been found,” the activist said.

Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades.   Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives. Manoj More's campaign against tree cutting on Pune-Mumbai highway in 1999 and Pune-Nashik highway in 2004 saved 2000 trees. During Covid, over 50 doctors were  asked to pay Rs 30 lakh each for getting a job with PCMC. The PCMC administration alerted Manoj More who did a story on the subject, asking then corporators how much money they demanded....The story worked as doctors got the job without paying a single paisa. Manoj More has also covered the "Latur drought" situation in 2015 when a "Latur water train" created quite a buzz in Maharashtra. He also covered the Malin tragedy where over 150 villagers had died.     Manoj More is on Facebook with 4.9k followers (Manoj More), on twitter manojmore91982 ... Read More

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