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Clarify stand on professional colleges: Vaithilingam

By Our Staff Reporter

Pondicherry Dec. 27. The former Chief Minister and ruling Congress MLA, V. Vaithilingam, today called upon the Rangasamy-led Government to clarify whether the professional colleges in Pondicherry had been declared minority institutions.

Addressing reporters here today, Mr. Vaithilingam said there was a trend of late that some of the colleges were declaring themselves as minority institutions. So the Government should come out with clarification whether they had been declared minority institutions officially. Unless an authority declared so, none could make self-declaration.

Mr. Vaithilingam said minority status could be decided either on the basis of language or religion. As far as Pondicherry was concerned, the Government was adopting French, English, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam as official languages. Hence any claim for minority status could be made only on the basis of language that was not coming under the official list. Only the State Government could declare whether an institution was a minority or not.

Mr. Vaithilingam said status of minority differed from State to State. Those speaking Telugu in Yanam could not claim to be minorities as Telugu was regional language there. The admission of students to professional colleges through the Centralised Admission Committee should continue without any change.

Left to launch agitation

Meanwhile, the Left parties planned to hold street-corner meetings to highlight the problems being faced by students in getting admission to the Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) at Kalapet.

The CPI and the CPI (M) secretaries, N. Kalainathan and T. Murugan told newsmen here that if the PIMS allowed to go scot-free in admission process, it would encourage the other private institutions.

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