In March , within six months of the United Progressive Alliance UPA government coming to power, the Sachar Committee, was set up to analyze the conditions of Muslims in India and suggest ways to ameliorate their socio-economic and educational conditions.
The cabinet approved the recommendations of the committee with alacrity and the Ministry of Minority Affairs was made the nodal ministry to monitor implementation. However, the report has failed to spark a rigorous analytical debate among the politicians, academics, and the civil society regarding the issues facing Muslims. While the UPA fully embraced the findings and the recommendations, the right-wing parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party BJP labeled it as another divisive ploy of the parties in power.
The findings of the report, however, did not show either of these in a very good light. The UPA constituents — supposedly supportive of Muslim development from the time of independence — had to swallow the fact that the conditions of Muslims in India are quite bad.
In fact, every policy measure that can potentially affect Muslims is being attributed to the Sachar Committee, irrespective of whether or not it had a place in the report. Typically, community specific recommendations, which were quite minor in the overall framework of the report, are being focused upon and actually enhanced. As a result, the main recommendations, which were not community specific, are getting sidelined and even being re-cast as Muslim-specific.
It is difficult to understand the politics of such decisions. On the other hand, why should the government lose a chance to project such a policy for all under-privileged groups and argue that it will help increase its participation in the emerging economic opportunities, given that development seems to be emerging as an important plank for political mobilization? The UPA has not only picked up recommendations in isolation, but has also highlighted the community-specificprograms and its implementation in its election manifesto and other communications.
Obviously, the government does not recognize its role in the overall state intervention strategy that the Sachar Commitee Report envisages. For example, while promotion of the Urdu language is welcome, the report gives equal importance to the employability of persons who study in schools and colleges. It would be unfortunate if the perspective on Muslim education gets dominated by Urdu and Madarsas. Apparently, the mainstreaming measures recommended by the Sachar Committee had much less political utility than promises of community-specific benefits and programs.
If one goes by past experience, these large numbers of minority-specific programs that are not only under-funded but largely uncoordinated, are unlikely to have a significant impact on minorities.
More importantly, a more progressive policy of mainstreaming efforts that might sharply bring out discrimination and under-development of the minorities gets bypassed. Nepal earthquake Relief work. My vote,my right awareness ppt. A few thoughts on work life-balance. Is vc still a thing final. The GaryVee Content Model. Related Books Free with a 30 day trial from Scribd. Get Clients Now! Propaganda Edward Bernays.
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And in the longer term, unless we can get a good sense of the relative importance of these multiple potential causes of Muslim disadvantage, it will be difficult to design meaningful public policy interventions that will truly attack the roots of Muslim poverty and disadvantage. Instead, we will have no choice but to simply list a variety of possible solutions, without knowing how significant any one of these might be. What would a good research strategy be, one that builds on the excellent datagathering work of the Sachar Committee but also moves us further in the direction of identifying which of the causes of Muslim disadvantage might be the most important?
First, we need to acknowledge that the bivariate analysis of the kind used in most of the tables and chapters in the report. A limited amount of this kind of statistical analysis, to be fair, is carried out in the report SCR: , And fascinating stuff it is too, though for some reason we are only told the broad direction of the results, and not given the regressions themselves, which would help us assess their validity.
In the second statistical analysis, the authors try to find out whether, controlling for a variety of attributes, Muslims have lower work participation rates than other communities. The author then identifies greater policy initiatives in education, credit and skill acquisition as the way to go, because these seem to have the greatest prospect of improving things for Muslims, especially the relatively large proportion of Muslims who are self-employed.
These few pages provide some of the highest quality analysis and best recommendations in the whole report — if you read only one page I would make it p But that said, the presentation of the statistical results could be made even more helpful. The obvious question from a policy perspective is whether the effects of being Muslim outweigh those of being poor, or male, or living in a town in explaining graduation rates.
Calculating such substantive effects is relatively easy and it would be very informative to be told, for instance, what would happen to Muslim graduation rates in Kerala or Uttar Pradesh if we increased average income or number of average years in school or some other variable by a certain percentage. Seeing the effects of specific policy interventions presented in this way would make the extent of the different benefits and trade-offs much more transparent for politicians and the public, which would help focus the public debate.
One model of what might be done with the wealth of data the Sachar Committee has collected is provided by an excellent recent paper on earnings inequality in India by Sumon Kumar Bhaumik and Manisha Chakrabarty, a paper that like Sachar uses NSS data. This generates at least two hypotheses: one is that general overt discrimination against Muslims is the cause although this is brought into question by their finding that returns to education for Muslims in were slightly higher, unless we think discrimination has increased ; the second and more likely hypothesis is that reservations for Muslim backward classes MBCs and OBC Hindus introduced over the past 25 years may provide these Hindu communities with better educational endowments and a wider range of good job options, at least in public service, compared to Muslims.
The committee at various times highlights the importance of state-level characteristics Muslims in some states consistently do better than in others , and of patterns of political access and incorporation, for instance, something I have dealt with in my own work, but these variables are not then brought into the analyses in the report as explanatory factors for Muslim disadvantage, perhaps because they are seen as politically sensitive.
Another variable that needs to be controlled for is the estimated proportion of illegal migrants from Bangladesh into India. If we are to believe the estimates inadvertently provided by minister of state for home Prakash Jaiswal to Parliament in mid, there are over 12 million illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in the country, the majority of whom are Muslims and who no doubt declare themselves as Indian in the census and in the social surveys from which the data on Indian Muslims used in the Sachar Committee are drawn.
How much of a difference might adjusting for migrants make? Let us assume for the sake of argument that there are 13 million illegal migrants from Bangladesh in India, a figure somewhat higher than the estimate presented by Prakash Jaiswal in mid but several millions lower than the 15 million estimate given by the previous BJP government. If we estimate the Muslim proportion at 80 per cent of this total given the fact that Hindus emigrate disproportionately from Bangladesh , that would give us perhaps 10 million Bangladeshi Muslims in India, or 8 per cent of the total Indian Muslim population.
According to the Sachar report appendix table 4. If, for the sake of argument, however, we were to assign the Bangladesh literacy rates — 31 per cent for women and 50 per cent for men — to 8 per cent of this total, then the literacy average for the remaining Indian Muslims would rise by almost a full per cent nationally, and by somewhat more than this in states such as Assam and West Bengal in which illegal migration has been the greatest.
On other factors such as our estimates of Muslim poverty levels the difference might potentially be even greater. In representative opinion polls, do Muslims report facing greater levels of discrimination in seeking housing, jobs or employment than other SRCs?
Can we identify research strategies to find out if empirically this is the case, and if so how important discrimination is in explaining outcomes compared to other factors such as poor access to good schools, credit, or skills training? Such studies have been used with increasing success in the study of discrimination in other societies, and they are especially useful where, as perhaps is the case in India, many members of the majority need some convincing about the challenges faced by minorities.
In the US, for instance, years of studies showing that African Americans were doing worse than whites on many dimensions, and were less likely to be employed in particular occupations than whites did not necessarily convince the majority that discrimination was at work.
But more recent studies have effectively established that much discrimination is taking place. Economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, for instance, had fictitious but equally qualified applicants with recognisably African American and white names Lakisha and Jamal vs Emily and Greg apply for 1, jobs, and were able to establish that the African American applicants got 50 per cent fewer callbacks for interviews than applicants with recognisably white names.
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