Sachar says Muslims need help

The panel is silent on reservation but recommends 'equal opportunities' for minorities, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Nov 18, 2006, 03:05:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Not ‘reservation’ in employment or educational institutions, but ‘equal opportunities’ is what the Rajinder Sachar Committee appears to have suggested for the uplift of Muslims.

In its report — on the social, economic and educational status of Muslims compared to other religious communities — submitted to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday, the panel emphasised that Muslims were lagging behind other religious groups on most development indicators. The panel stressed the need for devising appropriate programmes to address backwardness among Muslims.

Asked if the committee had recommended reservation for Muslims, Sachar, a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court, said that was for the government to decide. “We have informed the government about the status of Muslims in India,” he said.

The report said the community was “relatively poorer, more illiterate, with lower access to education, lower representation in public and private sector jobs, and lower access to bank credit for self-employment" than other religious communities.

According to a statement issued by the Prime Minister's Office, the report said that "in urban areas, the community mostly lives in slums characterised by poor municipal infrastructure" but added that there was considerable variation in the condition of the community across states and regions.

"We all feel it was an honest and just report," said Sachar, but refused to elaborate.

The Sachar panel was set up by the prime minister in March 2005. The report has been submitted against the backdrop of Singh asking for a 'fair share' for Muslims.

Accepting the report, the prime minister said "authentic" data on Muslims was necessary for planning, formulating and implementing specific programmes to address issues relating to socio-economic backwardness.

The report will be tabled in the winter session of Parliament, starting from November 22, for wider discussion and debate so as to build a national consensus on how to improve the social, educational and economic status of the community, the PMO statement said.

The seven-member Sachar panel collected data from central and state government organisations, the Registrar of the Census General of India, the Election Commission, the Union and state public service commissions, the University Grants Commission, the National Sample Survey Organisation and security agencies. Its members visited 13 states before finalising the report.

Email chetan@hindustantimes.com

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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