Latest News Update: Mar 24, 2010

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

[ZESTCaste] Govt rules out OBC quota in Women's Reservation Bill

http://www.ptinews.com/news/579537_Govt-rules-out-OBC-quota-in-Women-s-Reservation-Bill

Govt rules out OBC quota in Women's Reservation Bill

STAFF WRITER 16:1 HRS IST
Bangalore, Mar 24 (PTI) Union Law Minister M Veerappa Moily today
ruled out providing reservation for Other Backward Castes in the
Women's Reservation Bill, saying data on OBCs is not available at the
national level.

Moily said there would be no change in the bill compared to that
passed in the Rajya Sabha and exuded confidence that it would get
through the Lok Sabha also in April.

"There is no provision in the Constitution to provide for OBC
reservation, particularly for political reservation, even though for
employment and education, reservation is provided," he told reporters
here.

Moily said census on OBCs was not pursued since 1931. "So unless these
data are available, it is not possible to pick up who's OBC and who's
not OBC.

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[ZESTCaste] Pak Dalit gets civilian honour in recognition of his services

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Pak-Dalit-gets-civilian-honour-in-recognition-of-his-services/595105

Pak Dalit gets civilian honour in recognition of his services

Agencies Posted online: Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 at 1431 hrs
Islamabad : For the first time ever, a Pakistani Dalit has been
decorated with a civilian honour in recognition of his services for
the uplift of society.
Sono Khaghrani was presented the 'Tamgha-e-Imtiaz', a civilian award,
by Sindh Governor Ishratul Ebad on behalf of President Asif Ali
Zardari in Karachi on Tuesday.

Khagrani, the chief doctor in Thardeep Rural Development Programme,
was given the award on the occasion of Pakistan Day.

He has been working for the uplift of impoverished sections of
society, with special interest in the areas of health and education,
for several years.

Khagrani said he was "very happy" that the government had acknowledged
his work and that he had become the first Dalit in Pakistan to receive
such an award.

"This is the first time that someone from my community has received an
award, and I am unable to express my happiness in words," he told BBC.

"I am proud of my work... Irrespective of which section of society one
hails from, if one works hard and with honesty one's work will be
praised one day," he said.

Khagrani said the award has been a boost for him and he now wanted to
work not just in Sindh province but the whole of Pakistan.

Khagrani, who hails from Tharparkar district, was born into a poor
Dalit family in 1954.

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[ZESTCaste] Post-matric plan for SC, ST may go

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/Post-matric-plan-for-SC-ST-may-go/articleshow/5717482.cms

Post-matric plan for SC, ST may go

Amit Sharma, TNN, Mar 24, 2010, 02.49am IST

CHANDIGARH: The scheme of post-matric scholarship given to ST and SC
candidates of Punjab, seeking admission in professional courses in
Panjab University (PU), is likely to be discontinued from the coming
academic session as authorities have not received reimbursements from
the state government. As such, the matter will be tabled before the
syndicate meeting scheduled for March 29.

As per the scheme, students belonging to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled
Tribe of the state are exempted from paying tuition and non-refundable
fees on the condition that the state would reimburse the amount.

However, no grants have been provided by the government till date.
Sources said the DPI colleges, Punjab, was informed about
reimbursement of money to SC and ST students of the state from 2008-09
onwards. An official said, "The government has failed to fulfil the
condition due to which, the committee formed to look into the matter,
decided to discontinue the scheme."

If the syndicate approves, then benefits to those in PU and its three
regional centres will be withdrawn.

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[ZESTCaste] ‘General’ students fail to make the cut for media course at Jamia

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/-General--students-fail-to-make-the-cut-for-media-course-at-Jamia/594823/

'General' students fail to make the cut for media course at Jamia

Chinki Sinha

Posted online: Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 at 0059 hrs
New Delhi : More than two-thirds of students at the Jamia Millia
Islamia's PhD program at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre
belong to the SC/ST category. The reason - the general category
students failed to make the cut. Barring one, most applicants in the
category did not get the minimum qualifying marks — 50 per cent in two
sets of papers — in the entrance examinations, according the
university officials.
So, in the non-exempted group, six out of eight students are in the
SC/ST category. One of them, a former student qualified for the Jamia
quota.

While the University Grants Commission (UGC) has repeatedly tried to
encourage filling up of reserved quotas for Scheduled Caste and
Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) students in universities, a section of
students in Jamia Millia Islamia allege they have a problem quite the
opposite: too many SC/ST candidates and very few in the general
category.

The university, on the other hand, says applicants from the general
category did not make the cut, and the quality of applications was not
good enough to draw more than 16 candidates as against the advertised
number of seats at 56.

There are three other general category students in the exempted list —
applicants who already have M.Phil degrees or have passed National
(NET) or State Eligibility Test (SET) are not required to take the
entrance examinations made mandatory by the UGC last year to improve
the quality of the PhD students. Outraged students, however,
criticised the university's selection criteria. They claimed though
the university advertised 56 seats in the PhD programme, the centre
has taken in only 16 students.

The university, which set up a team of senior professors to look into
the allegations, refuted the charges. According to Jamia, it was
fulfilling the constitutional mandate by giving admissions to SC/ST
applicants, who get a relaxation in the minimum qualifying marks for
admissions.

The inquiry committee spent close to three hours checking the lists
and matching them with the criteria and found nothing amiss, said
university officials.

According to officials, only those general category applicants who
made the cut, or got the qualifying marks, were offered admission.

"By constitutional mandate, we are required to give seats to SC/ST
candidates. SC/ST students met the criteria," Jamia Registrar Prof S M
Sajid told Newsline. "Only one student from the general category got
50 per cent."

Last May, the UGC made entrance exams mandatory for PhD applicants
after the Mungekar Committee report highlighted malpractices in the
process of getting PhD degrees, and how the quality of students in PhD
programmes across universities was poor.

Now, besides an entrance exam, students will also have to face an
interview where they will be required to discuss their research area.
While central universities had set basic standards for PhD aspirants,
many state and deemed universities had no such standards.

Prof Sajid said Jamia wanted to use the entrance examinations to
ensure quality. "If only 16 students could make it, it wasn't a case
of favoritism or bias," he said. "It was an instance of only the
deserving candidates making it to the programme."

For SC and ST candidates, for whom a reservation of 15 and 7.5 per
cent respectively exists, there is also a relaxation in the minimum
qualifying marks for admissions. So, nine SC/ST candidates were able
to get in the programme, Prof Sajid said.

But the university said its system erred in assigning quotas to
candidates and when candidates presented documents supporting their
claims of being an SC/ST student — or a former Jamia student as in the
case of Amit Chawla — the mistake was rectified. At least in three
instances the students' names appeared in the list of those who
appeared in the examinations under the general category, while their
names appeared in SC/ST category in the final list.

Again, in the case of one student (Dilip Kumar) whose name appeared in
the general category in the initial list, in the final selection list
the name appeared with students who were exempted from taking the
entrance examination. In the fifth instance of such a system error, a
general category student's name was moved to the Jamia reservation
quota in the final selection list.

The lists are all on the university's web site:www.jmi.nic.in. Prof
Sajid said: "We are working on it. It's our first year and we are
trying to fill in the loopholes."

The admission debate
* Students says Jamia advertised for 56 seats in PhD programme at
Jamia's AJK Mass Communication Research Centre
* University enrolled 16
* 8 exempted from taking entrance exams: 5 SC/ST candidates made the cut
* 8 others took entrance exam: 7 SC/ST candidates admitted

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[ZESTCaste] The marketplace of ideas (Opinion)

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/The-marketplace-of-ideas/594917

The marketplace of ideas

D. Raja

Posted online: Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010 at 0238 hrs
In 1915 in a village named Ooruttambalam in Kerala, the great Dalit
revolutionary Ayyankali took a Pulaya untouchable girl for admission
into a Malayalam school. The upper castes set fire to the school to
prevent the untouchable children from "defiling the educational
institution". This was followed by the first-ever agricultural strike
in the history of the nation, fought not for wages but for school
admission. After nearly a 100 years (and 60 years of the Indian
republic), education and admission will be as inaccessible as for the
little Pulaya girl. This time, the question is not about the right to
entry, but the cost of education.
As a nation, we know the travails of educating the children of Dalits,
adivasis, marginal farmers and toiling industrial workers. But the
rich in our country never had this problem. Even the salaried middle
class could look up to low-fee high-quality institutions built by the
government to educate their children. If the HRD minister's dream
comes true, the entire middle class will become debt-ridden to eager
private banks and dormant nationalised banks. In 10 years, there will
be no difference between the farmers of Vidarbha and the
English-educated salaried middle class.

One can imagine the plight of parents who took loans to send their
children to Australia, and their consequent troubles. Education, once
almost free, has now become a costly, globalised and privatised
commodity. The UPA was visibly under-committed to implementing the
95th amendment made to the Constitution by inserting Article 15 (5) to
make education accessible to Dalits, adivasis and the backwards. The
amendment envisaged reservation in all government, aided or unaided
private educational institution. But with UPA-II, one only hears of
liberating education from the clutches of the government, revamping
higher education etc. — because education is a saleable commodity.

The second indication of things to come is the pricing of application
forms. The price of a mere form is never less than Rs 500 in private
and sometimes even in government-run institutions. How can a student
whose family falls under the poverty line (less than Rs 20 a day as
per the Arjun Sengupta report), afford one? Will the whole family go
hungry to buy one application form?

The right to education humbug, unfortunately, is restricted to
government institutions. The poor will not have right of entry into
elite public schools — the government is not willing to pay the high
fees, and nor are the schools willing to accept poor children. So by
2015, again we will have a poor Pulaya girl waiting outside a public
school.

The Union HRD minister has brought in the Educational Tribunal Bill
which deals with any dispute arising between students and
institutions, teachers and institutions and the institutions concerned
with any regulatory body. That means there will be more work for the
lawyers in our country.

Next comes the Foreign Education Providers Bill which will allow a
foreign institution to operate in our country and probably charge
tuitions in dollars or euros, and push our foreign-education-crazy
middle class to run around banks (and money lenders) to cough up the
cash. The UPA is also bringing in a bill on accreditation to allow the
entry of private accrediting agencies into the country, both foreign
and local, to rank private educational institutions and star them from
one to five. Instead of expanding and increasing the reach of the
National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) which is the
premier and highly authentic institution established by the University
Grants Commission, headed by highly respected academics like Prof.
Goverdhan Mehta and Prof. H.A. Ranganath, the government has chosen to
open this country to roadside shops to award accreditation to our
business-minded private educational institutions.

Again the lawyers in our country will find their plates full because
the government is coming up with another bill, purportedly to contain
capitation fee, but actually designed to impute criminality to
teachers through the Prohibition of Unfair Practice in Technical,
Medical, Educational Institutions and Universities Bill. This bill
will allow the police to enter educational institutions on one or the
other pretext, the slightest violation or even false information about
the facilities and faculty. Upon violation of any of the 25 listed
violations, the Central government (usurping the state's government's
role) can fine up to Rs 50 lakh or sentence the teacher up to 10
years. This is not to defend errant insititutions, but whether such
actions warrant the imputation of criminality is the basic question
that Parliament must ponder. After all, education is a field for
learning, not for litigation.

It is an entirely different issue that the HRD minister and the UPA
are least bothered about the rights of state governments to run
educational institutions, and regulate them in the interest of
linguistic culture and integrity. There will be a day when the nation
will have to rue the Centre's unwarranted entry into the states'
domain and the imposition of the HRD ministry's whims, to cow down,
control, regulate, access, accredit, implicate in criminal cases, the
education sector in the state governments.

UPA -II is now creating another SEZ — special education zones which
will lead to a further divide between the haves and have-nots in a
country where education is already the primary basis for the gulf
between the rich and poor, the rural and the urban.

The writer is CPI national secretary and a Rajya Sabha MP.

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[ZESTCaste] Ahead of Ambedkar jayanti, Cong, BSP jostle for dalit mindspace

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/Ahead-of-Ambedkar-jayanti-Cong-BSP-jostle-for-dalit-mindspace-/articleshow/5717495.cms

Ahead of Ambedkar jayanti, Cong, BSP jostle for dalit mindspace
TNN, Mar 24, 2010, 01.51am IST

NEW DELHI: Ambedkar united the dalits but his birth anniversary next
month will trigger a clash for community votes in Uttar Pradesh, with
BSP set to join Congress in playing to the dalit gallery.

The garland controversy has alerted chief minister Mayawati to ward
off any dangers it can pose to BSP's strong grip on its core
constituency. The chief minister has asked partymen to observe April
14 at district-level with gusto "in view of other parties trying to
woo dalits".

Sources said Mayawati, defiant in the face of criticism of her
currency garland, struck a strong emotional chord with partymen in a
meeting, invoking mentor Kanshi Ram and his passing away to stress
their importance in her struggle.

Party leaders anticipate escalated political tension in the state as
BSP's celebrations at district level clash with Congress's plans. The
latter is fielding Rahul Gandhi to flag off a `yatra' from Ambedkar
Nagar on Ambedkar jayanti, in a bid to shore up support for the party.

The BSP chief is moving to safeguard the core votebase, chastened as
she is after Lok Sabha polls.

What has surprised partymen is the strong plea made by Mayawati two
days after her currency garland at a Lucknow rally kicked off a storm.
Wearing another similar garland to cock a snook at Congress and SP
criticism, she made an emotive plea to MPs, MLAs and officebearers at
a closed-door meeting.

She told them she had lost the "shield" of Kanshi Ram and they were
her "support" after his passing away. "You are my brothers and
sisters," she said, adding, "You will stand for me in such time."

The plea came with the directive for celebrations on April 14 because
"some other parties are trying to celebrate Ambedkar jayanti because
of dalit votes".

In the process, the race for the key electoral community's attention
is set to turn competitive. While SCs have stuck to BSP all along,
Congress seems to be working on a different plan. The tactic seems to
be to chip away at BSP's core base. Mayawati, if forced to raise her
`bahujan' rhetoric in retaliation, will risk alienating upper castes
to Congress's advantage.

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[ZESTCaste] Fwd: Fwd: REQUEST: India dalit documentaries

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: budhaneversleeps budhaneversleeps <budhaneversleeps@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 7:47 AM
Subject: [ZESTCaste] Fwd: REQUEST: India dalit documentaries
To: mailsiddhartha.k@gmail.com

Hi,
This is Rupesh kumar sending the links of two dalit documentaries.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiEPG1t2aF8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnDeTjrxOy8
http://budhaneversleep.blogspot.com/
Thank you,
Rupesh kumar

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