Setting up of Equal Opportunity Commission may see more delay

"Recommendations of the Group of Ministers (GoM) have been taken into account in preparing the Draft Equal Opportunity Commission Bill, 2011. This Bill was again circulated to various Ministries/Departments concerned and comments of most of the Ministries have been received.

"As the comments received need further consultation, some more time will be required for its finalisation before its introduction in Parliament," Minority Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid has told Lok Sabha in a written reply.

The setting up of the EOC to look into the grievances of deprived groups was one of the recommendations of Sachar Committee, which went into the issue of backwardness of minorities and submitted its report to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006.

The EOC was supposed to be an omnibus body striving to facilitate equal opportunities for all the deprived groups and encourage this both in private and public sectors.

However, with a number of ministries opposing this large mandate of issue on the ground that it will lead to the overlapping of responsibilities and encroachment of others' domain, a Group of Ministers headed by Defence Minister A K Antony in August 2010 concluded that the EOC should confine only to minorities.

The idea of confining EOC to just minorities was not received quite enthusiastically by the Minority Affairs Ministry, which felt that this will kill its very purpose and as far as minorities are concerned, there is already a National Commission for Minorities. MORE