SC/ST seats stay vacant

Not enough SC/ST students pass out from schools and therefore the quota is not filled.

Updated on: Apr 17, 2006, 22:56:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The HRD ministry may have stipulated 27 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes in Central education institutions, but the 50-year old quota of 22.5 per cent for SC/ST students in higher education institutes still remains vacant.

The ministry might have thought twice before opting for the Mandal model had it considered that only 16 per cent of total (over one crore) students in higher education institutes in India were from SC/ST.

As per the ministry's own data on admissions: In class I to V as many as 27 per cent of the total students were from the SC/ST category. But, their share gradually fell as the students climbed the school ladder. Only 24 per cent of them remained in class V-VIII and their number fell to 19.1 per cent by the time they reached class XII.

It is not that SC/ST students were not getting admission in schools. The ministry's data says that about 91 per cent of SC/ST students took admission in classes I to V as compared to the overall rate of 98 per cent. They, however, steadily dropped out. For example, of about 2.31 crore SC students admitted in classes I to V only about 12 lakh reach higher education institutes. The scenario is even worse for ST students with a higher dropout rate.

An official said, there are not enough SC/ST students passing out from schools and therefore the 22.5 per cent quota is not filled. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, convenor of National Knowledge Commission, says that reservation is not a complete solution.

"Access to higher education without enough incentives for marginalized sections is the core problem. Our emphasis should be on inculcating quality in them through various means," 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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