Indian-American Muslims Protest the Very Low Level Implementation of the Sachar Committee Recommendations

By TwoCircles.net staff reporter

Washington DC : Muslims of India residing in USA are very disappointed at the recent decision of the Government of India regarding the very low level implementation of the recommendations of the Sachar Committee for the upliftment of India's impoverished Muslims.  This Committee was formed by the Indian government itself and in November 2006 the Prime Minister of India gave public assurances that the committee's recomendations to help the Muslims will be implemented in full.

In a press release by Association of Indian Muslims of America they claimed that  all the government has done is to decide to develop an action taken report with very low level proposals for the uplift of the Muslim community and to form yet another commission to find means to improve education in the community.

They said in the press release that the government has totally ignored
the major recommendations of the Sachar Committee like  Classify Muslim OBCs as OBCs and provide them the same reservation in education and employment as available to all OBCs, Establish a special program to uplift education in the educationally backward Muslim community by establishing quality schools and colleges in Muslim majority areas in the various cities in India, Establish a special program to provide easily available loans to small businessmen in the Muslim community from the nationalized banks so that they can build their businesses and uplift the community,  Improve significantly the infrastructure in many Muslim majority areas in the various cities in India.

They alleged that most significant political parties in India's United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) government and the parliament did support
the implementation of the Sachar Committee recomendations.  Yet,
Congress party the dominant component in UPA chose to not even discuss the said report in parliament or to appoint a Joint Parliamentary
Committee to implement the report.   Instead they unilaterally decided to implement only a very small part of the recommendations.

In addressing many other recommendations of the Sachar Committee, e.g. scholarships to needy Muslim students, establishing a properly funded corpus for the Central Waqf Board, establishing a program to develop the teaching of Urdu in schools to those students whose mother tongue is Urdu. etc the government action implements them at an unacceptably low level.

They said "We the Indian-American Muslims in USA strongly protest
against this unfair attitude of the Indian government in refusing to
implement the meaningful recommendations of its own Sachar Committee for the badly needed uplift of the Muslim community, the single most impoverished community in India".

They appealed to the Prime Minister of India and the President of India to make specail additional efforts to implement the Sachar Committee recomendations in full at the earliest.