Fixed percentage formula not binding,rules NCMEI

The order has come on a petition filed by Cuttack-based Buckley Primary School run by Christians. The Orissa government had held that the school cannot be given minority status as there were not sufficient number of Christian students in the school.

The NCMEI has said that imposing a criteria which mandates a minority-run educational institute to admit a fixed percentage of students from their own community will impinge on the rights of minorities to establish and run minority educational institutes as enshrined in Article 30(1) of the Constitution.

The NCMEI judgment will bring relief for hundreds of minority educational institutes,particularly the Christian-run ones,many of which have been denied minority status by state governments on that basis.

The Supreme Court has in two of its judgments dealt with the issue. While in one it said that a substantial population of students in a minority-run educational institute must be from the minority community,in another it has directed the states to fix a percentage of minority students that an institute must enroll to be awarded minority status. This ‘fixed percentage” has to be decided on the basis of the population of minorities in the states,the level of primary/secondary and higher education and the local needs of the specific area where the school is set up.

Further,the apex court said that if a particular minority educational institute had also received financial aid from the state government,then the latter can also specify the percentage of non-minority students they would have to admit.

While NCMEI had conveyed the SC direction to all states asking them to fix this percentage,none of the states responded to the Commission.

Meanwhile,a huge number of cases pertaining to denial of minority status to institutes piled up before the NCMEI,which has now taken a view that the SC orders are related to cross-border admissions and were not applicable to admissions within the state.

The NCMEI order also notes that since minorities can establish and run educational institutes irrespective of language and religion,a fixed criteria on admissions would never work for minorities like Zoroastrians who are very small in number across the country or say for Sikhs in Kerala.