Out of the 27 per cent quota for Other Backward Classes (OBC), backward Muslims will get 8.5 per cent reservation in educational institutions, HRD minister Arjun Singh told members of the National Monitoring Committee on Minority Education on Tuesday.
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At a meeting chaired by the minister, committee members thanked Singh for introducing reservation for backward castes, including Muslims, in educational institutions.
The HRD ministry has formulated a draft Bill on reservation in central educational institutions, which has been circulated to different ministries. The Oversight Committee is also preparing a roadmap on how best to implement the quota regime.
On the controversial issue of the National Madarsa Board, the committee constituted a three-member panel to study the subject in detail and submit a report in a month’s time. “The panel will also examine the present system of disbursing money to madarsas and will suggest better ways for utilisation of government money,” said committee chairperson Zafar Ali Naqvi.
To improve Urdu education, AMU and Jamia Millia Islamia decided to train Urdu teacher for schools. The decision was taken following some members raising the issue of poor results in Urdu medium schools of the Delhi government. The result ranged between zero to eight per cent and all because of the absence of trained Urdu teachers, Naqvi said.
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Committee members also demanded a nodal agency on the lines of the UGC for implementation of different schemes under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan. “Though the government provides adequate money, utilisation at the ground level is poor. There was a unanimous view that a nodal agency could improve utilisation,” he said.
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Committee members also demanded a nodal agency on the lines of the UGC for implementation of different schemes under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan. “Though the government provides adequate money, utilisation at the ground level is poor. There was a unanimous view that a nodal agency could improve utilisation,” he said.
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.
