SFI launches nationwide campaign to counter anti-reservation agenda of RSS

by Abbas Adil

The Students’ Federation of India (SFI) on Friday announced a nationwide campaign against what it called ‘a day light murder of social justice and sabotage of reservation happening in the Centrally Funded Technical Institutions’. It alleged that the government is following the RSS’ exclusion agenda to do away with the reservation policy.

The left student wing demanded that the Ministry of Education must immediately release a white paper on the social category-wise distribution of admissions at all programs offered at the UG, PG and PhD levels of every Central Educational Institutions, for the last five years, along with their gender-wise data.

Bringing to light an alarming underrepresentation of students from the SC, ST and OBC category during the last three years in the country’s premier technology institutions, SFI general secretary Mayukh Biswas said it is a larger part of the RSS agenda to exclude the marginal sections of society from higher education. Speaking with Muslim Mirror, Biswas said the new education policy is also a tool to implement the skewed Hindutva agenda which has no place for SC, ST and weaker sections in their scheme of development.

He said the admission figures provided by the Minister of Education in response to the questions raised by two Left members Elamaram Kareem (Kerala) and Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya (West Bengal) in the Rajya Sabha are revealing.

These figures have once again proven the blatant disregard for Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admissions) Act, 2006 in the Centrally Funded Technical Institutions, he added.

Releasing a detail note on the persistent violation of reservation norms in the nation’s premier technical institutions, SFI said it has contributed to the underrepresentation of teaching faculty from the marginalised and backward groups at these institutions.

The data released by the ministry shows that there is a clear lack of compliance of the CEI Act.

Some key observations:

Indian Institute of Science

OBC category had almost negligible presence at 1% of the total admissions during 2016-2018.
Zero admissions from SC and OBC in the integrated PhD program during two consecutive years.
31 National Institutes of Technology

Particularly alarming has been the lack of admissions of ST category in some NITs. NIT Calicut, Patna, Nagpur and Kurukshetra for instance, have not admitted a single ST category student in the past three years. In some other NITs, there has been zero admission from the ST category across different years in this period. Similar has been observed for SC category also at certain NITs.
Of the total students admitted at NIT Calicut over the three years, only 5.1% belonged to SC category. And at Jaipur, only 5.2% came from the SC category. The bigger NITs have admitted comparatively fewer students from SC category.
NIT Nagpur on the other hand, seems to not have admitted any student from the SC, ST and OBC category during these three years
More than 70% of the admissions in NIT Surathkal, Srinagar, Kurukshetra and Uttarakhand belonged to the General category17 Indian Institutes of Information Technology
The five centrally funded IIITs have admission levels of SCs and STs at 11% and 1.9% of the total 638 admissions.
The rest 12 run in a PPP model admitted very poor number of students from SC, ST and OBC categories- respectively 6.5%, 1.5% and 15.6% of the total 340 admissions. Many of them have not recruited any students from these categories.
IIIT Gwalior, Kancheepuram and Kurnool did not admit any ST students during these years.
7 Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research

Although IISERs have a better reservation compliance in their BS-MS program, certain violations were found. IISER Thiruvananthapuram fell behind in ST reservation compliance.
IISER Pune and Tirupati had dropouts of more than 65% from the reserved categories.
Following the efforts of SFI, the poor implementation of CEI Act, 2006 in PhD at IITs was confirmed by the Ministry of Education last year with admissions of SC, ST & OBC at 9%, 2.1% and 23% of the total. Although an expert panel was set up to improve the implementation of reservation in IITs, the committee did a shoddy work in addressing the issues at PG/PhD level.

Coming down heavily on the BJP-led government and RSS, Biswas said they have completely scrapped reservation system in IIM Ahmadabad and caste based discrimination has been increased many folds in these institutions resulting in an alarming number of drop-outs in the education institutions.

He said SFI has called upon all its units across the country to organise protests and campaigns highlighting the “crude manner in which social justice is murdered in educational institutions by the Hindutva regime.

It also appealed to Parliament members to take up this alarming issue in the ongoing Parliament session and also join with the democratic sections in the fight for social justice, he added.

Anti reservation policy of RSS, SFI, Students’ Federation of India

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