Following are the recommendations of the Rajindar Sachar committee report on the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in the country tabled in Parliament on Thursday:
- Setting up an Equal Opportunity Commission to look into grievances of deprived groups like minorities.
- Working out nomination procedure to increase participation of minorities in public bodies.
- Providing legal mechanism to address complaints of discrimination against minorities in matters of employment, housing, schooling and obtaining bank loans.
- Establishing a delimitation procedure that does not reserve constituencies with high minority population for SCs
- Initiating and institutionalising a process of evaluating contents of textbooks to purge them of explicit and implicit material that may impart inappropriate social values, especially religious intolerance.
- Creating a national data bank where all relevant data for various socio-religious categories are maintained.
- Setting up an autonomous assessment and monitoring authority to evaluate the extent of development benefits, which accrue to different socio-religious categories through various programmes.
- Encouraging the University Grants Commission to evolve a system where part of allocation to colleges and universities is linked to diversity in student population.
- Facilitating admissions to the most backward amongst all socio-religious categories in regular universities and autonomous colleges and evolving alternate admission criteria
- Designating Arzals Muslim group as most backward classes as they need multifarious measures, including rerservation.
- Providing Hindu-OBC-type attention to Ajlaf Muslim group.
- Providing financial and other support to initiatives built around occupations where Muslims are concentrated and that have growth potential.
- Increasing employment share of Muslims, particularly where there is great deal of public dealing.
- Working out mechanisms to link madrassas with higher secondary school board.
- Recognising degrees from madrassas for eligibility in defence, civil and banking examinations.
- Providing hostel facilities at reasonable costs for students from minorities on a priority basis.
- Promoting and enhancing access to Muslims in priority sector advances.
- Including in teacher training components that introduce importance of diversity and plurality and sensitising teachers towards needs and aspirations of Muslims and other marginalised communities.
- Opening high quality Urdu medium schools wherever they are in demand and ensuring high quality textbooks for students in the Urdu language.
- Drawing Muslims on relevant interview panels and boards.
- Improving participation and share of minorities, particularly Muslims, in business of regular commercial banks.
- Setting up a national Wakf development corporation with a revolving corpus fund of Rs 500 crore.
- Creating new cadre to deal with specific Wakf affairs.
