CFI accuses Modi of curbing minority scholarships, demands President’s intervention

Mangaluru, Aug 18: The Campus Front of India has lashed out at Narendra Modi led government for allegedly curbing educational scholarship given to minority communities during his tenure and demanded the intervention of President of India in the matter.

Addressing a media conference in the city on Tuesday, CFi Karnataka State General Secretary Muhammad Thufail, said that it was unfortunate that the scholarship has dramatically decreased after NDA government came to power.

In 2013-14 totally 70,84,527 Muslim students had applied for the scholarship while only 66,67,674 students applied in 2014-15. We have seen 5.88% decline in the number of applications. The reason for the decline was the BJP led central government’s negligence towards minorities. There could be further decline in the number of the applications in this year 2015-2016 of the applications mostly due to the newly introduced National Scholarship Portal, said a release issued by the CFI.

The central government has on boarded various scholarship schemes under one central portal. The way this portal has been handled so far by the government foreshadows ability of executing of the “Digital India” plan of the Modi government and it isn’t looking anywhere near optimistic.

Previously, the pre-matric Scholarship (1ststd to 10th std) was directly applied through schools. This time only 1st to 8th standards students can apply manually. The 9th and 10th students are forced to apply via online Portal. It’s very difficult and tedious to apply via online. One application takes at least around 45 minutes for completion provided the Server is not busy. The server is always busy in few of the places.There are hundreds of the students who are worthy of scholarship and are facing so severe issues and the authorities are also clueless.

The portal has become the cause of the distress for many of the students. It doesn’t open the most of the times. Even if it does, the completion of all the steps without any interruptions is impossible. The portal has low bandwidth, low space and a very bad server. It’s very surprising that the central government has not upgraded the server while combining all the schemes into one portal. Each application needs at least 9 documents of less than 100Kb to be uploaded. It’s very difficult ensure this and ensure quality of images.

Along with all the technical issues there are other discrepancies in the portal like various colleges, bank branches, courses are not listed at all.

The last date for the application is fast approaching, even then we see multiple rules being change in the portal. Only 3% of the number of students who applied for scholarship last year have applied so far this year, the release said.

This is a country of villages. 70% of this country’s population live in the villages. Most of the demographics are computer illiterate, who are not comfortable with internet and scanning the documents. There have been complaints that brokers are taking huge money from the students for the application. If Karnataka, the technically leading is facing these problems, then what could be the condition of the students in the technologically weak states like Bihar and Assam.

All the issues seen in the portal and the fact that the PM office is directly handling the Minority scholarship schemes makes one think whether the central government is conspiring to curb scholarship given to the minorities. Is the Government trying to Reduce the Number of applications submitted so as to reduce the budget for the scholarship can also be reduced. This anti-minority mindset of the Central Govt is clearly visible in this whole scholarship fiasco and this is a bad omen for the secular and social fibre of the Nation and a joke of Ek Bharat Shresta Bharat as there are clearly two agendas working here of development and decrement.

The demands of CFI include, 1) extension of the final dates of all the scholarships, 2) simplified process for the website must be put in place, with consultations from parent and students’ bodies, 3) high level official must be appointed to look after the website’s technical glitches, 4) to rectify the errors that have been occurring in the website, 5) authorities must equip the ground level staff and train them and clear out all the technical issues 6) the management of the scholarships must be handed over to state governments with separate servers and equipment.

During this press meet CFI state vice president Muhammad Thafseer, State Secretary Muhammad Shakir, D.K district President Irshad Bajpe and District General Secretary Fayaz Manjanady were present.