Yisrail Shaikh and Mehboob Shaikh, two inhabitants of Tumsar town in Maharasthra’s Gondia district, can claim to be beneficiaries of the prime minister’s 15-point programme for minorities.
Yisrail Shaikh and Mehboob Shaikh, two inhabitants of Tumsar town in Maharasthra’s Gondia district, can claim to be beneficiaries of the prime minister’s 15-point programme for minorities.
Replying to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed by MA Khalid, a resident of Dongri, the town’s municipal council claimed that it spent Rs10 lakh from funds set aside for minority welfare programmes to build a concrete road between houses belonging to the two Shaikhs.
The council also said that as part of the programme, it built drains and drain covers on another four stretches linking houses belonging to Muslim families.
The municipal council’s claim struck Khalid as strange because, by the logic used by the council, the government may as well claim that the Sir JJ Road viaduct to be a project under the programme because the bridge passes through a largely Muslim area of the city. Why should a locality get civic facilities, taken for granted in other areas, as a special privilege?
The 15-point programme is meant to improve access of minority groups to education and health services, apart from enhancing their business and employment prospects in government departments.
Programmes to prevent communal riots are also covered under the scheme. Item number 11 mentions improvement of conditions of slums and areas inhabited by minority communities. So, is the Tumsar council right in claiming that the money it spent on improving roads in a Muslim locality meets the criteria of the minority welfare programme?
It is not clear. When we asked minister of state for minority affairs Fouzia Khan for her opinion, she said she was not sure whether the work comes under the programme. “Ideally, it should come under the programme because every government department should spend 15% of its funds for the 15-point programme. But I do not know whether a municipal council can claim that it has spent on minority welfare by paving a road in a minority-dominated area. The scheme cannot be used for the benefit of a few individuals. This is the subject matter of an inquiry,” she said.
Dr Vidya Rao, head of social welfare administration department at Tata Institute of Social Studies, said while it is possible that the work done qualifies as a project under the 15-point programme, such schemes are normally implemented in a discriminatory way.
“For instance, schemes meant for other backward classes (OBC) do not reach Muslims even if they belong to OBC groups. In the Tumsar case, the reply given by the council is not clear,” said Rao.
Khalid wrote to various government departments, including the Tumsar municipal council, to find out how they were implementing the scheme. Replies from other government departments showed severe inconsistencies. “The information is disappointing, as most agencies are not doing anything about the programme,” said Khalid.
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