Man jumps to death in Beed dam for Matang reservation

AURANGABAD: A 34-year-old man committed suicide on Tuesday morning by jumping into the waters of the Bindusara dam near Pali village, about 15 km from the Beed district headquarters, demanding that the government earmark a quota for the Matang community from the 13% reservations meant for the SC category.
Police said the man, Sanjay Dnyanoba Taktode, has left a video expressing his disappointment with the way the government was handling the community’s demands.The video has since gone viral.
“Taktode, who lived at Salegaon in Keij taluka, left a video which was supposedly recorded before he jumped. His body was pulled out of the dam and sent to the Beed civic hospital for a post-mortem,” deputy superintendent of police A S Khiradkar told TOI.
Police sources said a chit recovered from Taktode’s clothes mentions that all his belongings be handed over to his family.
In the video, Taktode states that the community has been experiencing many problems and that it has been organising agitations, protests and morchas from Nagpur to Mumbai to get the attention of the Fadnavis government. He said the government has been ignoring the Matang community’s demands.
“To draw the attention of the Fadnavis government, I am taking ‘jalsamadhi’ in the dam,” Taktode has said in the video.
The incident sent shockwaves across the Matang community in the state. Suresh Chavan, working president of the Maharashtra Kranti Sena, said the government should do something before the situation goes out of hand. He demanded that the government provide a job to Taktode’s next of kin, pay his family a compensation of Rs 25 lakh and take note of his demands.
Santosh Pawar of Lahu Prahar, an organization representing the Matang community, which had held an organised demonstration for their demands on February 21, said, “We have been demanding categorization of the SC category for the last 40 years. Even government-appointed commissions have made such recommendations. The community has made a number of representations to Devendra Fadnavis but to no avail.”