Udupi : The Bhovi community members from Udupi district warned of boycotting the forthcoming taluk and zilla panchayat elections if caste certificates are not distributed them at the earliest.

Speaking to the mediapersons, Udupi District Karnataka Bhovi Community Association president Uday Kumar Bhovi said the confusions in the caste name have put the community into trouble. In the district, the community resides in and around 15 villages in Kundapura taluk. The majority are tenants and are also engaged in daily wage work, he added.

The Bhovi community was included in the section 341 (1) (2) of Indian Constitution in 1976 following the recommendations made by the erstwhile royals of Mysore. In 1977, the Karnataka government declared the Bhovi community as the scheduled caste. As a result, the community people obtained caste certificates by submitting the applications to the tahsildar from 1978 to 1991. Later, the tahsildars, whoever took the charge, stopped giving the caste certificates to the people belonging to the community, he added.

Udupi District Karnataka Bhovi Community Association former president Satyanarayana Bhovi charged that the administration stopped issuing the caste certificates due to pressure from other castes. Vaddar community people who migrated from Gujarat to Odisha and later to Karnataka had their caste named after Boyi. However, once the Bhovi community was in Scheduled Caste category, the Vaddar community people changed their caste into Bhovi from Boyi. They are availing the benefits under the reservation category and ironically, the illiterate original Bhovi community men are unable to avail the benefits.

They procure caste certificates under Bhovi caste and also put pressure on the administration not to provide caste certificates to the original community men, he alleged.

He added that the community still remains backward in the society without proper amenities and government aid. The community is deprived of government facilities due to the non-availability of caste certificates, he claimed and alleged that in the past three months, the Kundapura and Byndoor tahsildars have received more than 100 applications online for caste certificates. However, the applications are not processed and the they are escaping with unreasonable answers, he charged.

Bhovi demanded justice and said the community will boycott the forthcoming taluk and zilla panchayats if the situation continues to be the same.