Scholarships for minorities a failure in Northeast

The government’s much-touted “Maulana Azad National Scholarship” scheme for meritorious female students from minority communities, which offers scholarly incentives to students of Classes 11 and 12, has failed to cover students from crucial Northeastern states like Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Tripura between 2013-14 and 2015-16.

This is despite the fact that the NDA government has a special focus on the development of Northeastern states, and has been aggressively formulating policies for the region.

According to information available with this newspaper, during the three years mentioned above, only two girl students were covered under the scheme in Arunachal Pradesh in 2015-16, and the amount disbursed for their scholarship was a paltry Rs 0.24 lakh.

However, for Mizoram and Tripura, only one student each was covered during 2015-16 and the amount given out for them was Rs 0.12 lakh each.

Apallingly, for all the three states, no student was covered under the scheme in 2013-14 and 2014-15. No student in Sikkim was covered under the scholarship scheme in all the three years for which data is available with this newspaper.

Union territories like Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Lakshadweep have figures similar to Sikkim.

The scholarship is given to those meritorious girls from minority communities whose parents’, or guardians’, annual income from all resources is less than '1 lakh.

The Maulana Azad Education Foundation (MAEF), which is a voluntary not-for-profit social service organisation, governs this scheme under the aegis of the minority affairs ministry.

According to official sources, the only source of MAEF’s income is interest earned from the investment of its corpus fund. Till 2015-16, MAEF had received a total corpus fund of '1,136 crore from the Centre.

This is kept as fixed deposits with banks. The interest earned from these are used for the implementation of MAEF’s educational schemes.

Naturally, this does not provide MAEF with much legroom to run the scheme, and therefore it faces a paucity of funds.

Sources said that MAEF is now investing its corpus fund as per the finance ministry’s guidelines. To maximise interest earning, the MAEF has decided to call for long-term interest rates from banks. It also decided to invest the corpus fund in long-term fixed deposits of three to five years to maximise earnings, official sources added.