Minority scholarship scheme constitutionally valid:Gujarat HC


By our correspondent, Ahmedabad, 15 February 2013

A five judge bench of Gujarat High Court today in its judgement said central government’s minority scholarship scheme is constitutionally valid. While three judges were in favour of this judgement, two judges were against it. This means, the Gujarat government will have to implement this scheme in the state.

The background

Pursuant to Sachar Committee’s report on the social, economic and educational status of Muslims in India, the Prime Minister had launched a 15-point Programme for the Welfare of Minorities under which a scheme for awarding pre-metric educational scholarships to children belonging to five specific minorities was initiated.

The purpose of this Scheme was to “encourage parents from minority communities to send their school-going-children to school, lighten their financial burden on school education and sustain their efforts to support their children to complete school education”.

The basic conditions of this Scheme are: (a) the student concerned must not get less than 50% marks in the previous examination; (b) the annual income of parents/guardian must not exceed Rs. 1 lakh; and, most controversially, (c) the student must be a Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist or Parsi.

Refusing to implement it in Gujarat owing to the fact that it discriminated between students on the basis of religion alone, the Gujarat Government stated that such a Scheme would cover only 52,260 minority students as against 6 lakh eligible pre-metric students falling within the income criteria.

This led a Gujarat Congress member Adam Chaki to file a Public Interest Litigation in the Gujarat High Court asking the Court to issue directions to the Gujarat Government to implement the Scheme. The Central Government, through the Assistant Solicitor General, supported the stand taken by Chaki.

Last year the Gujarat HC Bench, consisting of the Chief Justice, held that such scholarship scheme would violate the Constitution. The judgement relied primarily on a 2005 Supreme Court judgment (by a larger five-judge Bench) which held that a “further classification by way of micro-classification” was not permissible under the Constitution.

This matter was then referred to a larger Bench for final adjudication.

Today the larger bench has validated the scholarship scheme and asked state government to implement it.

Read related article from DeshGujarat archive: Gujarat HC gives UPA a lesson or two in ‘education secularism’