A parliamentary panel on social justice on Wednesday (March 19, 2025) asked the Union government to “urgently” pursue the centralisation of Eklavya Schools.
| Photo Credit: The Hindu
A parliamentary panel on social justice on Wednesday (March 19, 2025) asked the Union government to “urgently” pursue the centralisation of Eklavya Schools and empower the National Education Society for Tribal Students (NESTS) further to run them. Proposals for the move have been pending for months, as reported by The Hindu earlier this year.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment also noted the “slow” progress in the implementation of the PM-JANMAN package across 29,000 villages where particularly vulnerable tribal groups reside. It said that so far, scheme saturation had been achieved in just 4,288 of these villages.
The departmental House committee, headed by Karnataka MP P.C. Mohan of the BJP, made these observations in the seventh report on the Demands for Grants of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs for the financial year 2025-26, tabled in the Lok Sabha on March 19. In the report, the panel also pointed out that the Union government’s project to set up tribal freedom fighters’ museums to honour their struggles was moving slowly, noting that only three of the 11 sanctioned museums had been inaugurated so far.
The panel, in its report, stated that the Tribal Affairs Ministry’s budget was increased in this financial year to ₹14,925.81 crore but also pointed out that the Ministry was unable to spend the full allocation it received year after year.
It said that this was on account of problems with the Single Nodal Agency balances, non-submission of utilisation certificates and technical issues with the Public Financial Management System (PFMS), recommending that the Ministry needed to “strictly implement” measures to overcome these issues.
In the report, the House panel also touched upon the National Fellowship and Scholarship Scheme and the National Overseas Scholarship for tribal students’ higher education, saying that the Ministry was “not able to spend a single rupee under the National Fellowship Scheme” throughout 2024-25, adding a “token amount” was allocated for 2025-26.
It recommended that the number of slots under the National Fellowship Scheme be increased from 750 to 1,000 and slots under the National Overseas Scholarship scheme be raised from 20 to 50, also suggesting an increase in the scholarship amounts.
In discussing the scheme for Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRS) for tribal students, which was reworked in 2020 with the intention of centralising the schools’ administration along the lines of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs), the panel noted that the recently approved increase in recurring cost per student was still not enough to match that of the JNVs.
It further pointed out that proposals from the NESTS to sanction 126 additional posts for its Head Office (current sanctioned strength is 28) and set up nine Regional Offices (ROs) with provisions for over 260 posts in them remain pending with the Department of Expenditure.
It said, “Since NESTS is managing 728 targeted EMRS across the country and most of the schools are established in far flung tribal areas, the Department of Expenditure need to consider the proposal of NESTS and give due importance to the responsibility entrusted over them in comparison with NVS.”
The committee went on to say that unless the centralisation is approved with the setting up of ROs directly under the NESTS, “it may not be possible” to hold State EMRS societies accountable, which are currently run by respective State and Union Territory administrations. The panel noted that 136 of the 477 functional EMRS continue to operate out of rented or other government buildings, urging the government to make sure all these schools are run from their own buildings.
On the tribal freedom fighters’ museums, the panel appreciated the government’s efforts to recognise their struggles but noted that eight of the museums that were sanctioned between 2017 and 2020 were yet to be finished. The three that were launched had come up in Jharkhand, Jabalpur and Chhindwara.
Published – March 19, 2025 08:40 pm IST