Chandigarh, Nov. 13 -- The high court on Wednesday sought responses from the Punjab government and the Centre on a plea alleging thousands of Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) individuals in the state were dropped from the list of beneficiaries for the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G). The Punjab and Haryana high court bench of chief justice Sheel Nagu and justice Sanjiv Berry acted on a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by Sukhjeet Kaur (48), a daily wage labourer from Muktsar, which demanded that state government notification of July 2024 and February 2025 be quashed, vide which the state government excluded 6,952 persons from the permanent waiting list without any notice or ground re-verification. Sukhjeet's plea alleged that she and numerous similarly situated SC/ST residents of Gidderbaha, who were initially verified as eligible for the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana - Gramin (PMAY-G) and issued valid Awaas Plus IDs and were included in the permanent waiting list, were later arbitrarily excluded from the scheme by the state government, purely due to political motivations following the 2024 bypoll. "The exclusion has been carried out in a highly discriminatory and politically motivated manner, particularly targeting SC/ST families in constituencies like Gidderbaha, where the ruling party perceived a lack of political support. This action is in clear violation of the central government's SOP, which mandates proper gram sabha resolutions and documented verification before deletion. No such process has been followed in the present case," the plea alleged. Appearing for the petitioner, lawyer Nikhil Ghai, told the court that in February 2025 rural and panchayats department wrote to all executive officers, zila parishads in the state, that all the surveyors, who are conducting verifications on the ground, must coordinate with the respective MLAs at the time of conducting the survey. "The obligation imposed upon the surveyors to report to the respective MLAs shows the intention of the government to politicise the preparation of the list of the eligible persons and influence the exclusion of people who do not support the ruling party. In fact, the central government, while setting out the procedure, has not included the interference of MLAs in the process of surveys," Ghai pointed out....