'CMP implementation could have avoided row'

Civil society groups today blamed UPA's failure to implement the Common Minimum Programme on education for landing itself in a sticky situation over the proposed reservations for OBCs in higher education.

Vinod Raina, a member of the Central Advisory Board for Education, and activist of the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, Madhya Pradesh, said that if the government had kept its very first promise in the CMP of allocating 6 per cent of the GDP for education, then no one would have murmured a word of protest over its proposed reservation for OBCs.

Speaking at an assessment programme in which 100 NGOs from all over the country are taking part, Raina said that 6 per cent of GDP would have meant Rs 1,82,206 crore, and a mere one per cent of it for technical/higher education would have meant a whopping 16,000 crore, which is 20 times the expense government makes today.

"The government is now considering an amount of Rs 8,000 crore to tide over the crisis of providing seats for OBCs, without creating a seats crunch for the general category. With Rs 16,000 crore, the country could think of at least 90 IITs and 3,000 universities," Raina said.

He said that the US with one fourth the population of India had 3,000 universities. Raina who was part of the team which re-drafted the Free and Compulsory Education Bill inherited by the UPA government from the previous NDA government, said that the Bill did not even figure in the CMP.

For bringing out the law would have meant financial commitments of another Rs 45,000 crore per year in addition to the existing 40,000 crore the government spends on primary education.