Dr.A.Hidhayathulla 1 & Mahammad Rafee.B 2

Socio-Economic Status of Minorities: An Assessment of the Role of Minority Institutions and State Initiatives Through Inter-group Comparisons Dr.A.Hidhayathulla1 & Mahammad Rafee.B 2 1Associate Professor of Economics, Jamal Mohamed College, Tiruchirappalli, India 2Research Scholar (Ph.D MANF JRF), Jamal Mohamed College, Tiruchirappalli, India

INTRODUCTION • The Online Etymology Dictionary defines minority as group of people separated from the rest of a community by race, religion, language, etc. Prevalence of minority groups is almost found in all the countries of the world. • India is a country of diversification. The country has minority groups in terms of race, religion and language. The wellbeing of the minority people can be assessed by analyzing the socio-economic status of these people. Theoretically speaking, the socio-economic status of people of minority group is heavily uneven as it is the case of people of majority group too.

The state initiatives are put in place to improve the socio economic status of deprived class after independence. State funding the educational institutions run by minority people is one such initiative. As education is the only instrument to achieve economic upliftment state funding of education was believed to improve the socio-economic status of the target group. It is difficult to assess the role of minority institutions and state initiatives in the absence of survey data at micro level. One way to overcome the difficulty is to assess the socio-economic parameters of the people of minority people and compare it with those of the people of other deprived class at macro level. This paper, therefore, has used census and other published data on literacy, health, employment and poverty.

This paper identifies the government schemes and programmes to uplift minority groups and compares the improvement in the attainment of socio-economic status of different groups of minority people in India. Comparison of improvements in socio economic status of deprived class of people belonging to majority religion is also made. Accordingly, this paper is structured to have four sections. The first section introduces the main focus of the paper. The second section lists the schemes implemented by the Government of India for minority welfare. Third section analyses the improvements in the attainment of socio-economic status in recent decades. Conclusions are present in section four.

II Schemes and Programmes for Minority Welfare • The constitution of India, through the article 30 (1) provides for the rights of the Minorities to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice. Besides, the Twelfth Five Year Plan lists the following programmes as an endorsement to continue from the Eleventh Five Year Plan. • • Scheme for Providing Quality Education in Madrasas (SPQEM), • • Scheme for Infrastructure Development of Private Aided/Unaided Minority Institutions (IDMI) • • SarvaShikshaAbhiyan (SSA) • • Kasturba Gandhi BalikaVidyalayas (KGBVs) • • Extension of Mid-Day-Meals (MDM) Scheme to Madarsas/Maqtabs. • • 'Saakshar Bharat' • • Jan ShikshanSansathan (JSS) • • RashtriyaMadhyamikShikshaAbhiyan (RMSA)

Strengthening of the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language (NCPUL) • • Establishment of the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions (NCMEI) • • List of Minority Concentration Districts • • Sub-Mission on Polytechnics under the coordinated Action for Skill Development. • • Girls Hostel Scheme. • • Setting up Model Schools • The above schemes clearly convey that the Government of India is taking strong initiatives to promote the wellbeing of minority people.

III Socio-economic Status of Minority People in Recent Decades • This section analyses the changes in the socioeconomic status of religious minority groups in India. Select parameters such as literacy and poverty are taken up for discussion. • Education • Education is the key for empowerment. It makes people employable. Employability enables them to generate income. Income generation elevates the standard of living and socioeconomic status. If the functioning of minority institution is sufficient in facilitating this development linkage it should have resulted in improvements in socio-economic status of minority people. The literacy of different religious minority groups is given below.

Table 1: Percentages of Population and Literacy Levels of Minority Communities in India

Muslims constitute the largest minority community group in India while the literacy level is the least among the other minority communities. The efforts put to educate the Muslims seem to be inadequate and are to be extended further to achieve 100 percent literacy of all the minority groups. The Sachar Committee Report estimate that one-fourth of Muslim children in the age group of 6-14 years have either never attended school or are drop-outs. For children above the age of 17 years, the educational attainment of Muslims at matriculation is 17 percent, as against national average at 26 percent. Only 50 percent of Muslims who complete middle school are likely to complete secondary education, compared to 62% at national level". The Report has also estimated the levels of educational attainment among Muslim women, Muslims in rural areas as well as in technical and higher education to be low. This clearly establishes that initiatives to educate Muslims need more attention.

Poverty • Head count ratio is the simplest measure of poverty. Though the measure has serious limitations it gives a conservative estimate of poverty. The estimate with rural urban breakup for the periods 1993-94 to 2009-10 as computed by Thorat and Dubey is given below.

Poverty Incidence by Religious Minority Groups in India (headcount ratios),1993–94 to 2009–10 (%)

Even the underestimated numbers reveal that the incidence of poverty among urban Muslims is greater than the rural Muslims. The poverty incidence among Muslims is greater than other minority groups for the period from 1993 to 2009-10. Had the role played by minority educational institutions and state initiatives been adequate, the incidence of poverty would have been much lower. • The percapita consumption levels, mortality rates, higher education enrolment ratio, school dropout rates, access to assets etc are the other indicators for which sufficient empirical literature available to corroborate that among the religious minority groups Muslim lag behind.

CONCLUSION • Minority educational institutions and state initiatives for promoting minority welfare played a commendable role in spreading literacy among the people of minority groups and uplifting them economically. However there prevails substantial variation among different minority groups. Muslims constitute the largest minority community but the socioeconomic indicators suggest a dismal picture. Therefore, affirmative actions are needed to raise up the literacy level of Muslims and the state programmes and schemes are to rigorously enforced to make the attainment of development indicators equal to other minority groups.

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Dr.A.Hidhayathulla 1 & Mahammad Rafee.B 2