1,500 new schools for Muslims

The Govt is going to boost secondary education in the Muslim-dominated districts, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Nov 15, 2006, 23:35:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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In the backdrop of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking to give Muslims a “fair share”, the HRD ministry has drawn a plan to strengthen secondary education in the Muslim dominated areas.

In a proposal submitted to the Planning Commission, the ministry has proposed to start 1,500 new Jawahar Navodalaya Vidalayas (JNV) in the country, with emphasis on Muslim dominated districts. Many of these schools will have majority of Muslim children and will cater to their specific needs.

Several reports including Justice Sachar panel has detailed lack of basic minimum education among Muslims. According to HRD ministry, about 59.1 per cent Muslims in India are literate as against the national percentage of 65.6 per cent.

About 10 per cent of Muslim children have never gone to school and the dropout rate among Muslim children has been reported to be highest, even when compared to socially weaker sections.

Only about 14 per cent of the Muslim children enrolled in primary level reach higher secondary. And, their enrolment in the higher education institutions is just 5-6 per cent.

In a bid to end this disparity, the ministry has proposed the fully residential JNVs for the Muslim dominated areas, in which Urdu will also be taught with other conventional courses. The majority of students will be enrolled from the Muslim community with up to 75 per cent from the rural areas.

“The idea is to provide them quality education so that they can compete with best in the country,” an official explained. Under Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, the ministry has already approved new 6,918 primary and upper primary schools in minority-dominated districts in the current financial year.

The commission, which has already approved the proposal in principle, will decide on the financial outlay only after the sub-group on education submits its report. “We expect to finalise the plan by end of November,” a planning commission official said.

Other proposals like giving scholarships to Muslim children will also be discussed at the meeting.

The HRD ministry has also proposed to set up 1,500 new Kendriya Vidyalayas in the next five years to bolster quality education for children of the government servants and those in armed forces.

Many of the new KVs will come up in the remote parts of the country, an official said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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