New Delhi: Even as Finance Minister Arun Jaitley increased the funds for SCs and STs in Budget 2018, a former senior government official has said that the amount is not sufficient as the post-matric scholarship scheme is already mired in arrears of over Rs 11,000 crore.
According to P S Krishnan, former secretary to government of India, the post-matric scholarship scheme (PMS) for meritorious students of minority communities, has fallen to arrears over the years and lost ‘open endedness’.
According to the ‘open endedness’ clause, the amount required for disbursement shall be released in time for the post-matric students and will be formalised in the subsequent Revised Estimate.
Krishnan had written to Jaitley on December 31 last year informing him that in 2015-2016, 70% of the dues were in arrears and in 2016-17, the entire dues were in arrears. The former official had written to Jaitley in 2016 also.
“These arrears add up to more than Rs 10,000 or 11,000 crore. The Budget session was advanced so that outlays meet developmental needs and claims become available right from the beginning of the new financial year. Taking the dues of 2017-18 also into account, so that it too does not fall into arrears, the total amount urgently required for PMS is Rs 15,000 crore,” Krishnan said, adding that only Rs 3347.99 crore was allocated in the Budget against the huge arrears of 2015-16, 2016-17 and 2017-18.
According to Krishnan, the goal of liberating the SCs and STs from their basic vulnerabilities has not been considered in this Budget, or for that matter in earlier budgets under different governments.
“Such accumulation of arrears is contrary to the basic feature of this scheme that is open-ended, which means whatever amounts are required for any number of SC and ST post-matric students shall be released in time and formalised in the subsequent Revised Estimate. Breach of this condition of open-endedness and accumulation of arrears has resulted in a large number of SC and ST students being forced out of the institutions for non-payment of fees,” the former official added.
Acknowledging the anxiety to keep down the fiscal deficit and how Jaitley kept it at a level of 3.2%, bringing it down from 3.9% in 2015-16 and 3.5% in 2016-17, he said, “This has rightly received widespread appreciation. But, to achieve a low fiscal deficit by reducing known dues is artificial and not realistic.”
The Post-Matric Scholarships, introduced through Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s initiative as a Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council in 1943 and extended to STs after Independence, is an open ended scheme.
The proportion of SCs and STs in the relevant age-group in higher education is less than the proportion of the population in the relevant age-group of the Socially Advance Castes (SACs), which includes the non-SC, non-ST, non-SEdBC castes (NSCTBCS) in higher education.
Out of the total budgetary outlay for 2018-19, the outlay for Central Sector Schemes and Centrally Sponsored Schemes is Rs 10, 14,450.79 crore. Out of this, the outlay for SCP/allocations for welfare of SCs at not less than 16.6% ought to be not less than Rs 1,68,398.83 crore, but only Rs 56618.50 crore (5.58% instead of 16.6%) has been provided; and the outlay for Tribal sub Plan/allocations for welfare of STs at not less than 8.6% ought to be not less than Rs 87247.77 crores, but only Rs 39134.73 crores (3.86% instead of 8.6%) has been provided.
“I request that a system may be introduced whereby PMS installments are released in advance so the money is available to students from minority communities at the beginning of each month /quarter,” he said.
Krishnan had introduced a system on these lines during his service as Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs in charge of SC and BC Development and Welfare and later when he was a secretary in Ministry of Welfare.
Elaborating on the method to ensure timely disbursement, he said, “This will require increasing provisions from year to year, which has to be estimated with proper reasoning provided in the Budget. The present impasse has arisen due to the outlay of PMS, which is grossly under-budgeted and the principle of ‘open-endedness’ has been lost.”
A day after the Budget, Rajya Sabha MP Narendra Jadhav blamed the Budget 2018 for ad-hoc allocation with regard to social protection. The allocation is broken from the proportion of the SC/ST population, he had said.
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