LAHORE: The Punjab cabinet on Thursday approved 2 per cent education quota for religious minorities in the higher education institutes of the province, a move lauded by many.
Minority Affairs and Human Rights Minister Ejaz Augustine said the quote was introduced to improve the lives of people hailing from minority communities. He said the job quota available for the minority groups was going waste because there were no “suitable candidates” available for the jobs.
To corroborate, he quoted data collected from government departments which “showed that most of the people belonging to the religious minorities were doing menial jobs”.
Just days before the end of the last government, the then Punjab higher education minister Syed Raza Ali Gillani had constituted a committee to deliberate the introduction of a minority quota for higher education but representatives from public universities presented a huge resistance to providing a special quota for religious minorities.
“We started our campaign for a minority education quota in 2015 with provincial and federal ministers, bureaucrats. The committee was constituted after our months of lobbying with Mr. Gillani. But no results came out of the effort,” National Lobbying Delegation for Minorities Rights Member Asif Aqeel said.
Christians are the largest minority of the Punjab province. Data from various cities in Punjab show that an overwhelming number of those sweeping roads, picking up garbage and cleaning sewerage comes from the Christian community who make up only about 1.6 per cent of the total population.
Similarly, the Sikh community also does not have a sizable number of students in universities. Cities like Multan, Rahim Yar Khan and Bahawalpur have a good number of the Hindu community and many of them come from the ‘Scheduled Caste’ who are living in deplorable conditions. “These three communities are definitely in need of this quota to bring them at par with the rest of the society,” said Aqeel.
Journalist Tahir Mehdi, who has done extensive work on religious minorities, sees this a very good step. “But there is need to implement it in letter and spirit as we have seen in the case of the job quota which is often filled with sanitation jobs,” said Mehdi.
