By Atif Jaleel, India Tomorrow,
New Delhi, 06 Jan 2014: The National Monitoring Committee for Minorities Education (NMCME), a committee established under the HRD Ministry, has said in its annual meeting that it has conducted various programs for the Muslim minority under the Common Minimum Programme, the Prime Minister’s 15 Point Programme with recommendations from the Sachar Committee to remove the backwardness of the minorities and the results have been satisfactory.
The day long Annual Meeting chaired by the Minister of HRD, Dr. M. M. Pallam Raju, discussed among other things, new initiatives to promote education among the minorities as well as its approach of the 12th 5-year plan, saying that “the XII Plan also adheres to the strategy of empowerment of Minorities through educational empowerment, skill development for employability, enhanced targeting to overcome socio-economy deficiency with forward and backward linkages, structures for monitoring with greater transparency with the help of the civil society.”
Going on to talk about the results of its work, the Minister said that the committee had done much for the upliftment of Muslims and the expansion of elementary schools had benefited them the most. According to him, “the enrolment of Muslim children in schools which has gone up from 9.4% in 2006-07 to 14.2% in 2012-13 at the primary level and from 7.2% to 12.1% at the upper primary level during this period.”
The Minister went on to say that “in the year 2012-13, the enrolment of Muslim students in elementary schools exceeded the share of Muslim in the country’s population.”
Under the government scheme of SSA (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan), the Minister stated that the scheme had done quite a lot of work for the upliftment of Madrassas with free textbooks being provided to 17.3 lakh students, 40000 Madrassa teachers had been provided with in-service training and 8235 Madrassas were provided school grants under the SSA in the current year.
Ending his speech, the Minister acknowledged that there was still much work to be done for the minorities saying, “Despite significant improvement at the ground level, I endorse the expectation of the Minorities that much is required to be done. The enormity of the task requires joint endeavour by the Centre as well as the State.”
The NMCME will also be taking up schemes such as the Maulana Azad Taleem-e-Baligan for imparting functional literacy to one crore Muslim adults in the age group of 15 plus; establishment of Educational Hubs by co-locating KGBVs, Girls/Women Hostels, Degree colleges in selected towns/districts, which are educationally backward and having substantial Muslim concentration; and a scheme on the lines of HUNAR for skill development among minority girls in the age group of 14 plus.
Dr. Raju also said that the process of establishing AMU Centres in Mallapuram in Kerala, Murshidabad in West Bengal and Kishanganj in Bihar was in progress.
