Minority Affairs Ministry seeks change in eligibility criteria

Minority Affairs Ministry today said it wants to change the eligibility criteria for classification of 'minority concentrated districts' by reducing the cut-off mark of such population from the existing 25 per cent to 15 per cent.

Union Minister for Minority Affairs Salman Khurshid said the government also favoured a "fresh look" at the Supreme Court restriction on the government for notifying any community as national minority, in an indication that it wants inclusion of more communities in such a list.

Addressing a function here, Khurshid suggested that his ministry wanted to declare a district as 'minority concentrated district' even if it has 15 per cent of such population.

At present, any district should have 25 per cent minority population to make it eligible for being declared as 'minority concentrated district'.

"We hope one day we will be able to convince ourselves, our colleagues and our Prime Minister that we bring the level from 25 per cent to 15 per cent as a cut-off perhaps in the next plan," Khurshid said.

"If that happens another 40 to 45 districts would easily be added to the 90 'minority concentrated districts' that we have today," he said addressing a conference of state minority commissions where Home Minister P Chidambaram was the Chief Guest.

He said Rs 3,500 crore are to be spent on these 90 districts in the 11th five year plan of which Rs 2,500 crore have already been released.

Originally the plan was to have more than 100 districts for the scheme but some of them were cut-off from the list as they did not fulfil the criteria for it on development parameters, the minister said.

"There are many districts in the country, which have high percentage of minorities like in Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, which were not included in the the list of MCD because they are well above the national average on development parameter," he said.