A nuanced government order issued by the Education Department in 1994 mandating reservations in admission to higher secondary courses (HSC) is yet to be implemented in the State.
The G.O. includes an instruction to all Chief Educational Officers to ensure ‘group-wise’ reservation of admission by ‘all kinds of managements’, allotting 18 per cent to SC, 1 per cent to ST, 20 per cent to MBC and Denotified Communities and 30 per cent to BC, with the remaining 31 per cent going to students in the OC category. This was aimed at providing equal opportunities to all students across the streams, and particularly to ensure that the most-sought-after Group I and Group II jobs had a fair representation. The 1994 G.O. cites the contents of a letter from the Director of Adi Dravidar and Tribal Welfare, explaining that over 60 per cent are being forced to join the humanities group, and that the chances of poor SC/ST students getting into various professional courses are reduced to a great extent. Further, the official called for group-wise reservation in the higher secondary entry level.
‘Unfortunate’“The original reservation for HSC courses, provided in a G.O. dated 22.3.1978, envisaged 18 per cent for SC/ST and 31 per cent for BC students,” explains noted educationist Kalyani. “It is unfortunate that no government has even bothered to implement it.”
It was in the quest for this 1978 G.O. that the 1994 G.O., mandating group-based reservation, was discovered, says Devaneyan A. of Thozhamai, an NGO.
“It was a struggle to even get hold of the order. No one in the school department was able to help me, and finally, after years of hunting for it, I managed to get it through an RTI petition.” D. Ravikumar, ex-MLA and the VCK’s nominee for the Vanur constitunecy, also recollects raising the issue in the Assembly in 2006. “I wanted it to be implemented so that poor, rural students are not continually pushed to vocational streams and humanities subjects. Not all these students go only to government colleges. In many instances, parents struggle to put them into private schools for a ‘better education’. The good thing is that the G.O. asked for group-wise reservation in private institutions also, giving those students a true chance.”
As much as educationists concurred that the G.O.s were progressive , they remained perplexed that they were never implemented in a State that claimed to look at social equity seriously. “This is a social protection scheme that was multi-dimensional and covered several vulnerabilities,” points out Aruna Rathnam of UNICEF.
Some educationists claim that there is not even a semblance of representation of Dalits in the science streams of many private schools.
