The Department of Primary and Secondary Education has withdrawn the Karnataka Educational Institutions (Recognition of Minority Educational Institutions Terms and Conditions) draft rules, which stated that a minority educational institution needs to have 25% students from any religious or linguistic minority community. The earlier rules, which required a school to have 25% of the total number of students in an academic year belonging to a particular religious or linguistic minority community, will prevail.
The draft rules issued last month have been withdrawn from the official gazette with immediate effect as there were procedural lapses while issuing it. A senior Minister in the Cabinet had taken exception to the draft rules, said sources. “It was issued even though it was under consideration by the Cabinet subcommittee. The matter was also pursued by the Chief Secretary who took officials of the Education Department to task,” a source said.
After the Cabinet opposed this, the model code of conduct came into place, so the permission to withdraw it was sent to the State Election Commission, after which it was withdrawn. The move has been welcomed by managements of minority institutions as well as educationalists who had felt the draft rules, if implemented, would have “helped several schools escape” from reserving 25% of their seats for students from weaker and disadvantaged backgrounds under the RTE Act. However, a source pointed out that a section of the senior Congress Ministers, who also run private educational institutions, were against fixing a percentage of students as a minority criterion.
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D.Z. Gulshad Ahmed, president of the Karnataka Unaided Minorities Schools Management Association, said they welcomed the move and that they would pursue this with the new government to ensure that the old rules stayed permanently. “There are various institutions who feel that no minority percentage should be fixed. But that would mean that the character of the minority institutions itself is lost and all schools can become eligible for minority status,” he said.