Quota roadmap by month-end

By this month-end, the HRD ministry expects to finalise the roadmap for implementation of 27 per cent OBC quota from the next academic year. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Apr 13, 2008, 24:44:19 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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By this month-end, the HRD ministry expects to finalise the roadmap for implementation of 27 per cent OBC quota from the next academic year. HRD minister Arjun Singh said the government would implement quota as soon as possible.

The HRD ministry is calling IIM and IIT directors to discuss the roadmap next week. The University Grants Commission has decided to call a meeting of all Central University vice-chancellors to discuss OBC quota implementation later this month. According to ministry officials, the heads of Central institutions of higher learning have been asked to come with the final plan on how they propose to implement the 27 per cent quota in a staggered manner.

Most educational institutions have told the HRD ministry that implementing the quota in two years would be a difficult proposition as not much work has been done on infrastructure up-gradation in absence of requisite funds. “We expect to implement seven to eight percent quota in the first year,” an official at IIM-Ahmedabad said.

Considering the preparedness of the institutions, the full rollout of OBC reservation may take three years for implementation from the next academic year. Incidentally, the OBC reservation law had given three years for implementation after its notification last year. The University Grants Commission will be disbursing Rs 872 crore to the Central Universities to augment its capacity this year to implement quota. “There are three months to make arrangements and I feel the universities are geared up to implement quota,” UGC chairperson Professor S K Thorat told HT.

All the Central Universities have already submitted detailed project reports for capacity building to implement 27 per cent quota. “Now the work has to start,” a UGC official said.

The Oversight Committee on quota implementation has suggested implementation in humanities, social sciences and arts in two years and sciences in three years.

HRD ministry officials said the government is mostly likely to extent the creamy layer applicable to OBC reservation in jobs to education. “The court may have asked to conduct a fresh survey but it validated the 1993 notification on creamy layer. Therefore, we can use the present concept creamy layer to implement 27 per cent OBC quota,” he 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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