The Hindu: Chennai: Thursday, April
28, 2016.
Speaking of
the 1978 G.O., noted educationist Kalyani laments, “It is unfortunate that no
government has even bothered to implement it.”
It was in the
quest for this 1978 G.O. that the 1994 G.O., mandating group-based reservation,
was discovered, says Devaneyan A. of Thozhamai, an NGO.
“It was a
struggle to even get hold of the order. No one in the school department was
able to help me, and finally, after years of hunting for it, I managed to get
it through an RTI petition.” He is hoping that now that the G.O. is unearthed,
it would be implemented post haste.
D. Ravikumar,
ex-MLA and the VCK’s nominee for the Vanur constitunecy, also recollects
raising the issue in the Assembly in 2006, and giving the then Education
Minister a memorandum. “I wanted it to be implemented so that poor, rural
students are not continually pushed to vocational streams and humanities
subjects. Not all these students go only to government colleges. In many
instances, parents struggle to put them into private schools for a ‘better
education’. The good thing is that the G.O. asked for group-wise reservation in
private institutions also, giving those students a true chance.”
As much as
educationists concurred that the G.O.s were progressive and “ahead of their
time”, they remained perplexed that they were never implemented in a State that
claimed to look at social equity seriously. “This is a social protection scheme
that was multi-dimensional and covered several vulnerabilities. Also, it came
way before the Right to Education (RTE) and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, remember,”
points out Aruna Rathnam of UNICEF.
Some
educationists claim that there is not even a semblance of representation of
Dalits in the science streams of many private schools. The focus should shift
from a board exam result-oriented approach to being truly inclusive, they add.
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