His comments come at a time when there is a clamour among Muslim organisations for implementation of the Ranganath Mishra Committee report which suggested, among other things, 15 per cent reservation for minorities (of this 10 per cent should be for Muslims) in education and employment. The report has been gathering dust at the Minority Ministry for the last two years.

The Mishra commission for religious-linguistic minorities had also demanded SC status for Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims.

Khurshid said it was time to “look at affirmative action a little more seriously” with a view to “inject an ability to compete rather than becoming constant beneficiaries of additional help”. In this context, he said the list of institutions, where scholarships would be awarded, should be expanded to include some outstanding private schools as well.

“The biggest scheme is scholarship. But the scholarship today is largely empowerment scholarship... I think we need to have greater emphasis on excellence. We don’t want to fall into the Macaulay trap of creating clerks. It is important to move from being peons to being clerks. But we want to make CEOs as well,” he said.

Besides fine-tuning implementation of the Sachar committee recommendations, he said his immediate priority would be to identify some “quick-impact” schemes like setting up big medical centres and universities in rural areas.

“If you come up with a housing project in Bhadohi it will have an impact, identified clearly as an outcome of our efforts to implement the Sachar committee report. I think a major big hospital in eastern Uttar Pradesh will have an impact... A hospital is not going to treat Muslims only, it will treat everybody. But there will be a sense, if it comes, that Muslims are not just asking, but they are giving,” he said.

... contd.