Skip to main content

Any reservations for backward states?????


Notice the tilt? Who's got the upper hand?

Most newspapers point out that it would cost the central government just about 8000 crores to get the infrastructure in place to increase student capacity in the existing centrally funded colleges to appease all sections of society.
And all this money is going back to the same centrally funded colleges in the same states.
Has Arjun ever considered reservation for the backward states? No. No. No. no no no

Reserve some time and read a little...
Even as the Central Government spearheads a policy for higher education tethered to reservations for an equitable India, what is shocking is the HRD Ministry's consistent negligence in allocating funds for higher education and for technical institutions to certain states since independence.
Digambra Patra (Department of Physics, Waseda University, Tokyo), a Japanese scientist of Indian origin, and professor Chitta Baral (Arizona University), who have analysed in detail the Union Government funding pattern, said states like Orissa, Bihar, Rajasthan
Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Kerala have been kept in the realm of backwardness by the HRD Ministry headed by Arjun Singh.
``What is surprising is the Central Government spending per person in higher education (we call it HRD-National Highway) is 43.52 times higher in Delhi, 25.9 1
times higher in Uttaranchal,19 times in Assam, 18.3 times in HP and 6.9 times in West Bengal as compared to Orissa,'' Patra and Baral said.(See box)
``Such imbalance is detrimental to these states because the most important resource of a state is its human resource but the Central Government expenditure for national higher and technical education per person in some states happens to be much lower,'' the duo said.
``The Prime Minister talks of a vision of an equitable India, announcing new Rs 500-crore IISERs (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) at Pune, Kolkata and Punjab whereas the National Institute of Sciences at Bhubaneswar was shifted to another location,'' they said.
``We have found that since Independence, states like Orissa and Rajasthan do not have any national institutes like IIT, IIM, IIIT, ISI whereas states like UP, West Bengal and Maharashtra have many such institutes and continue to get new ones. (We have ignored the REC-renamed as NIT since they are present in most of the major states),'' Patra and Baral said.
``Though we wrote to various people, including the Prime Minister, Sonia Gandhi, the Planning Commission and the National Advisory Council, we did not receive any response. The budget for 2006-2007, instead of addressing the inequity, has made it worse. The Central Government has not invested anything in the states that come at the bottom of the HRD list such as Orissa, Rajasthan and Bihar making them even more backward,'' Chitta Baral said.
(For more details check out http://equitableindia.org)

What's happening in Kerala.
The National IMA has called for a nationwide strike to protest against 27 percent reservation for OBCs in centrally-funded higher education institutes but the Kerala state IMA has decided not to join the stir. The reason is interesting because the five post-graduate medical colleges are not centrally funded and the OBC reservation is not applicable to these colleges in Kerala. (Sri Chitra Thirunal Medical Institute,Trivandrum is centrally funded.)
First published by The New Indian Express. Changes have been made.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Interesting website with a lot of resources and detailed explanations.
»

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: An Autobiography Of A Sex Worker by Nalini Jameela

I am 51 years old. And I would like to continue to be a sex worker.” This is how the candid and defiant opening statement in Nalini Jameela’s autobiography in Malayalam, Oru Lymgika-thozhilaliyude Atmakadha, goes. It at once throws a challenge at society’s double standards — harsh on prostitutes and soft on the clients. Nalini Jameela, who is the coordinator of the Kerala Sex Workers’ Forum, reveals her sordid story with no trace of compunction. Nalini was a 24-year-old widow when she entered the profession to feed her two children. At that time she did not think about the repercussions of her act. She writes, “I was earning Rs 4.50 at a tile factory near Trissur. My mother-in-law served me with an ultimatum to either give her five rupees a day to look after my children or leave the house. I recounted my woes to a friend, who introduced me to Rosechechi. Rosechechi promised me Rs 50 if I spent time with a man. The first thought that came to my mind was that my children would be looked

Kochi Muziris Biennale: Whorled Explorations

London-based artist Hew Locke was in for a bit of shocker when he reached the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 site, Fort Kochi in Kerala. His installation,  Sea Power , was apparently crafted from his imagination of what the historical kingdom of Cochin would have been. Indeed, he had yoked his imagination to that of a 17th century German printmaker. The printmaker had in turn conceived the kingdom of Cochin based on the tales of another. “My work is imagination based on the imagination of an image that was perhaps real. It was double fiction and I thought the prints were elaborate romantic imagery...but I discovered when I arrived in Cochin that this double fiction has elements of reality. People still wear lungis and walk around bare-chested,” says an amazed Locke. Hew Locke’s beaded frieze of mythological and historical figures that gently sway in the wind is a response to the biennial theme, ‘Whorled Exploration’, and suggests blips in the seminal mov­ements of history. Whorled Exp

SnooTea: Just My Style

(Photographs by Minu Ittyipe) It began on a lark to spiff up my morning cuppa. Oh well, I just wanted a change from what I had been drinking all my life. I am not complaining about the faithful brew that I stir up with tea dust, it does merrily improve with two extra spoonfuls of sugar but I was just plain bored with the regular. My concept of a cup of tea was corralled in the traditional Indian style- coppery coloured liquid topped with plenty of milk and sugar but now there was in me this undeniable thirst for a more delicate bouquet. Tranquilitea, Coonoor Curiously, though grown in our own backyard, few of us have heard of the orthodox leaf tea, forget the Silver Tips, Golden Tips and the White Tea etc.. that quietly find their way to the export market. To make a foray into this relatively unknown terrain, I headed for Tranquilitea, a tea lounge in the Nilgiris, for a cup of “Tippy” tea. On a sober note, you are cautioned not to confuse “Tippy” with the more commonplace “Tipsy” for