Five years after the Sachar Committee report was submitted, one of its members has flayed the UPA government for only cosmetic implementation of the recommendations for narrow political gains rather than use its empirical and analytical insights to broaden policy perspective regarding the minority community in general and the Muslims in particular.
In his article, published on the website of the Centre for Advanced Study of India (CASI) University of Pennsylvania, Rakesh Basant, professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad and a former member of the Sachar Committee, argues that main recommendations in the report, which were not community-specific like an Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) on the lines of the UK Race Relations Act, has been re-cast to make it sound Muslim-centric. He cites this as an apt example of the government’s outlook on the matter. The Centre and some states have been implementing the panel’s recommendations in a piecemeal manner, he says.