A Lot More is Needed to be Done

A full-fledged Ministry of Minority Affairs was created in 2007. Veteran Congress leader Mr A.R. Antulay was the first choice to head this ministry. The functions assigned to the ministry overlapped with those of others and Mr. Antulay had to work hard to give his ministry an independent shape. Mr. Antulay is very old and his vast experiences might have helped him as well as the ministry in its early days. The fact, however, is that the ministry failed miserably during his stewardship in fulfilling people’s expectations. The fund allocated to the ministry for carrying out welfare measures for minorities remained largely unspent.

The new minister, Mr. Salman Khurshid seems to be gradually overcoming the problems which are numerous and complex. Until September 2009 the ministry had spent less than five per cent of the funds allocated to it. Some reports suggest that things have improved since then and by December 2009 some 17% of the allocated fund was spent on various schemes launched to benefit the minorities.

Mr. Khurshid, in a sense, had to start afresh and now seems to have overcome some of the problems facing the ministry since Mr Antulay’s time. The advantage with Mr Khurshid is that he is relatively young, dynamic, energetic and focused. He is also free of seniority syndrome or complex which probably has helped him in solving some of the problems his ministry faced. Let us hope he would overcome the remaining obstacles as well. We specially hope that he would soon develop a viable mechanism to implement his ministry’s programmes effectively.

It would be appropriate to critically appreciate the ministry’s programmes and offer constructive suggestions. Let us all become stakeholders in the affairs of the ministry.

A flagship scheme of the ministry is distributing scholarships to increase minorities’ participation in the higher education sector. It is good that the scheme is being implemented through the UGC which has enormous experience in the field. One just hopes that the UGC acts a bit faster than it normally does. The problem, however, is that the total number of scholarships is just over 700. The number must increase to many thousands indeed. We have our reason.

The 11^th plan (which would end in less than two years) allocation for multisectoral development of minorities in 90 earmarked districts is Rs. 2750 crores. However, the approved fund for implementing minority-specific schemes was Rs 1562 crores out of which only 77 crores was spent upto September 2009 which is a mere 4.93% of the approved funds for 2009-10 and 2.8% of the 11^th plan allocation. It means huge amount remains unspent. And surely one easy and fruitful way to use the money should be increasing the number of fellowships.

The Ministry of Minority Affairs has announced over 700 scholarships for pursuing higher education. One scholarship is worth Rs. 12000/- per month and thus the seven hundred scholarships would cost a total of Rs. 122500000/- per annum which is less than one per cent of the approved fund (Rs 1562 crores) for the fiscal year 2009-10. One wonders why it has not been 10% of the approved fund as it would have created many thousand scholarships. We must keep in mind that multi-sectoral development of the minority-dominated 90 districts has to primarily focus on education, healthcare and housing. Therefore the demand for increase in the number of scholarship is not without reason.

We all accept that education is the key to empowerment. Education, therefore, must receive the focused attention of the Ministry of Minority Affairs. The ministry may be well-advised to focus not only on higher education but also on primary and secondary education. One wonders if it would be possible for the MMA to set up schools on the pattern of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas in the minority-dominated districts? If it ever happens, it would surely go a long way to educationally empower Muslims and other minorities.

A cursory look at the district level religious data reveals that a majority of districts have Muslim population between 8 to 15 percent. However, the 90 minority-dominated districts are the ones which have over 20% minority population. The need, therefore, is to also identify and earmark the districts with eight and above percentile of minority population for multi-sectoral development as it would help more and more members of the minority communities.

Just by opening schools we can not empower Muslims educationally. A big problem is how to reduce high dropout rate of Muslims in schools? Another problem is how to improve the quality of education at primary and secondary levels? These require far-sighted policies and long-term strategies. Above all, we need to create an effective and honest mechanism to implement the schemes we make.

[March, 2010]