OBC quota may hinder higher education plans

Higher education has put the HRD ministry in a paradoxical situation. Its plan to give a major fillip to technical education by increasing the annual intake by about 30,000 seats may get dwindled, courtesy its another social upliftment programme ? 27 per cent OBC reservation.

Published on: Nov 18, 2006, 13:24:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Higher education has put the HRD ministry in a paradoxical situation. Its plan to give a major fillip to technical education by increasing the annual intake by about 30,000 seats may get dwindled, courtesy its another social upliftment programme — 27 per cent OBC reservation.

The Planning Commission, which has agreed to allocate over 18,000 crores for expansion of higher education institutions to introduce 27 per cent OBC reservation, may not have sufficient funds for other higher education stream, technical education.

Smart Box

New institutes proposed

(total) cost* seats

Each IIT (3) 650 2,000

Each IIM (5) 400 750-1,000

Each IISER (3) 500 360-500

Each IIITs (20) 250 20,000-30,000

Each SPA (4) 350 400-500

Other areas (in higher education) might suffer, as government is committed for implementing the affirmative action and universalisation of secondary education, a commission official said. As per the commission estimates, it can spare only about Rs 10,500 crore in the 11th plan for technical education, including funds for expansion and improvement of the existing institutions.

“That’s why we are emphasising on more involvement of private sector in higher education,’ a commission official explained. Estimates for higher education is six times the money allocated in the 10th plan, whereas for technical education the increase has just been doubled.

HRD minister Arjun Singh has proposed to set up three new IITs, 20 Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), five Indian Institutes of Management, three Indian Institutes of Science Educational and Research and four Schools of Planning and Architecture.

Apart from them, seven engineering institutes have been proposed for upgradation to the level of IITs. HRD ministry officials said the new institutes will be different from the present ones as emphasis will be more on building ‘scientific’ know how and research.

The new institutes will come up in areas where the higher education facilities are not very good. “We will look at new town and cities for establishing the centres of excellence,” an official said.

The proposals readied by the ministry are being sent to the Planning Commission for consideration for inclusion in the final Approach Paper for the 11th plan.

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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