Panaji: Eight years after the launch of the pre-matric, post-matric and merit-cum-means scholarships by the central government for the educational progress of minorities, the scheme does not seem to be popular in the state mainly due to the meagre scholarship amount and lack of awareness about the scholarships.
The number of applications received under the scheme in the last five years amounts to only 28 per cent of the number of beneficiaries targeted, indicating that the scheme has been poorly implemented in the state.
According to the statistical figures furnished from the social welfare department, in the last five years, around 54,863 minority students were targeted to receive benefit under the three different scholarship schemes, but the social welfare department has been able to enroll only 15,369 beneficiaries. A large proportion of minorities in the state comprises of Muslims and Christians.
The department of social welfare is the nodal authority to scrutinise the applications and forward them to the ministry. The forwarded applications are then vetted and approved by the ministry for grant of scholarships. The pre-matric scholarship scheme provides annually Rs 1,000 to students from Std I to X while post-matric scheme is for undergraduates and postgraduates under which they can receive Rs 3000-Rs 4000 annually while the merit-cum-means scholarship is for students going in for technical, professional and vocational courses wherein they are eligible to receive Rs 25,000-Rs 30,000.
The main reasons for the poor response to the scheme are no proper publicity by the government and also the lack of willingness on the part of educational institutions to propagate the scheme among its minority students because it would burden them with additional work. Another cause of minimal response is the meagre scholarship amount and family income slab of Rs 1 lakh, Goacom reported.
The figures note that 47,113 students belonging to minority communities were targeted since 2010 up to the secondary level. The government has provided 13,941 pre-matric scholarships. Similarly, under the post-matric scholarship scheme, the target was 7068 but it has achieved around 889, which is only 12 per cent of the target achievement. For merit-cum-means based scholarship for professional courses, the target achievement, however, was 79 per cent because the target was just 682 minority students.
According to the figures, both funding and the fund utilisation have been a problem. In the last five years, when there was no 100 per cent target achievement, the state, however, utilised about 30 per cent more than the actual amount sanctioned of Rs 85.31 lakh under the pre-matric scholarship scheme and 5 per cent more than the sanctioned amount of Rs 115.58 lakh was spent towards merit-cum-means based scholarship. Under the post-matric scholarship, the department spent only 30 per cent out of the total sanctioned amount of Rs 72.94 lakh. However, the social welfare department later clarified that the excess amount reflected in the statistics was the amount that was received during one financial year and had remained unutilised. “Hence, it had to be carried forward in the next financial year,” said assistant director Sudesh Gaude.
Gaude said, “Though every year we have sent circulars to the schools and high schools informing them about the scheme, we neither received any response to the scheme nor did we do a follow-up.” He said it would be insignificant to address minority development without the collective efforts of the concerned authorities and educational institutions in creating awareness about the scheme to reach out to the population of the minority student community.
When an effort was made by this reporter to find out why such a small number of students from the minority communities has applied for these scholarships, it was found that most of the students or their parents were not at all aware about the scheme nor did their teachers help them in any way in filling up the application forms.
A teacher of a government-aided school said on condition of anonymity that most school teachers do not want to inform their students about these scholarships because they will start approaching them for filling up their application forms and that would mean additional work for them for which they will not be paid.