हिंदी
…Edu Dept should refund 80 cr collected from ‘Dalit’ students towards exam fee: Principal Budhram
…Like the Badals, Captain govt’s anti-poor and anti-Dalit stance has come to fore: AAP
Chandigarh, July 27
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Punjab President and MP Bhagwant Mann and state core committee chairman Principal Budhram have said the anti-Dalit policies and decisions of the Captain Amarinder Singh government, like its predecessors, had deprived the poor and dalit’ students studying in various government schools to professional colleges and universities in the state of higher education under the Right to Education (RTE), saying the Congress government was depriving the children of dalits, poor and common households of quality education under a well thought-out agenda.
In a statement issued from party headquarters on Monday, Bhagwant Mann said the researches by erudite scholars from all over the world had proved that quality education was the only beacon to eradicate the darkness of poverty and ignorance from any society, a sermon preached by the divine Guru Granth Sahib, alleging the successive SAD-BJP and now the Capt. Amarinder Singh governments, had been hell bent to prove it otherwise under a hidden agenda to target the poor and ‘Dalits’.
Mann claimed that if those lording over the state and the Centre from time to time had been a tad sensitive about the plight of the poor and ‘Dalit’, 25 per cent enrolment would have been ensured for them in all private schools, big and small government school under the Right to Education Act, adding that a large number of qualified and unemployed teachers would not have been left to take the road route to bag jobs, and that there would have been no discrimination in terms of availing of equal opportunities between the rich and the poor.
Principal Budhram alleged that if a whopping amount of Rs 2000 crore pending for the past 5 years under the Centre’s Under-Matric and Post-Matric Scholarship Scheme for Dalit Students, had been released to the students, the private colleges would not have to withhold their degrees, as the government did not release a single penny under the scholarship scheme to any public or private institution in the state for the last three years thus ruining the careers of teeming millions of students, which laid bare the anti-Dalit face of the Captain’s Government.
Principal Budhram said that the government could offer a rebate of Rs.1000 crore to liquor, sand and gravel traders under the guise of the corona pandemic, why couldn’t it refund the examination fees worth Rs.80 crore taken from government school students, even as the exams did not take place. He added that it was for the first time that a fee of Rs.800 per student examination fee was charged from the 10th class belonging to the Dalit community.
Bhagwant Mann said that if the AAP succeeded in forming the government in 2022, it would strive hard to make education accessible to all and offer equal opportunities for higher education in Punjab regardless of any discrimination between the rich and the poor, on the lines of the Kejriwal government by bringing drastic changes in the existing rundown set up.
