Govt to enforce quota in private institutions

Aims implement 10 pc quota for general category from next academic year.

Acceding to a long-pending demand, the Centre has decided to enforce reservation in admission to private higher educational institutions from this year to all categories of students.

This includes students from the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) under the General Category.

This comes days after Parliament passed a law for providing 10% reservation in government jobs and higher educational institutions to those belonging to EWS.

The move was seen as a balancing act by the government as the constitutional amendment, recently notified after President Ram Nath Kovind’s his assent, provided for 10% reservation in admission to EWS category students in both public-funded and private higher education institutions while the quota in admission for other category of students was implemented in public-funded higher educational institutions only.

During the debate on the constitutional amendment bill in the just-concluded Winter Session of Parliament, some of the lawmakers from Opposition parties in the Lok Sabha had also raised this issue.

“Reservation will be implemented for all categories of students — Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), OBC (Other Backward Castes) and the EWS — in both public-funded and private higher education institutions across the country from the academic year beginning 2019,” HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar said.

The HRD ministry, University Grants Commission (UGC) and the All India Council for Technical Institution (AICTE) will issue “orders in a week” to over 900 universities and some 40,000 colleges in the country for implementation of quota under the revised rules, he said.

“We will issue a full operational mandate for implementation of reservation in a week. We will also report to Parliament,” the minister added.

As per the government’s existing quota rules for admission of students in higher educational institutions, 7.5% seats are reserved for ST students, 15% for SC students and 27% for OBC students.

“The 10% quota will be provided for EWS students without affecting the percentage of seats reserved for the SC, ST and OBC students. The reservation for the SC, ST and OBC will remain intact,” Javadekar clarified. For providing 10% quota to the EWS category students, the minister said, nearly 25% seats will be increased across all higher education institutions including IITs, NITs, IIMs, central universities and other centrally-funded institutions.