Quota cost: Over Rs 9,000 crore

The entire quota budget may be much higher as medical colleges, NIFTs and agricultural institutions have not been included, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jun 27, 2006, 03:43:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Quotas for OBC students in central educational institutions may necessarily have to be staggered. And the University Grants Commission says it’ll cost about Rs 9,000 crore, over five times their annual budget.

These have come out of the deliberations of several of the five sub-groups constituted by the oversight committee, chaired by Veerappa Moily, looking into the matter.

The sub-group on central universities, headed by Syed Hamid, Chancellor of Jamia Hamdard University, favoured reservations in one go, and estimated a cost of Rs 4,800 cr. The sub-groups on IITs and IIMs prefer staggering quotas, and said it would cost Rs 4,100 cr.

The UGCs proposal covers 20 central universities and technical institutes. The entire quota budget may be much higher as medical colleges, NIFTs and agricultural educational institutions have not been included.

The central universities estimate came out of a June 21 meeting of the sub-group. “It’s on the basis of money spent on each student,” an official explained. The annual budget for these universities this year is about Rs 1,000 crore for about 10.5 lakh students.

At the IITs, it costs about Rs 2 lakh per annum to educate a student, and at the IIMs, it’s Rs 3 lakh. An IIT director told HT money would also be needed for special coaching to OBC students. The sub-groups are expected to submit their reports by June-end.

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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