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EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES FOR MINORITIES
Constitutional Safeguards
Article 30 of the Constitution gives the right to minorities, whether based on religion or language, to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice. Schemes under the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment The following two institutions are working under the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment
(i) Maulana Azad Education Foundation (ii) National Minorities Development & Finance Corporation (i) Maulana Azad Education Foundation
Maulana Azad Education Foundation is a registered society established with the objectives of promoting education amongst the educationally backward sections of the society and the minorities in particular. The Government of India provides grant-in-aid to the Foundation for building its corpus. The Foundation was having a corpus of Rs.70.01 crores earlier. With the addition of Rs.30 crores made in the Budget for the year 2005-06, the Corpus Fund of the Foundation has been enhanced to Rs. 00 crores. During the year 2004-05 the Foundation has released an amount of Rs.1.74 crares as subsequent installment of grant-in-aid to 102 NGOs/Local Bodies allover the country upto 31 st March, 2005. Three schemes viz. Maulana Azad Sadbhawna Kendra, Maulana Azad National Scholarship for Meritorious Girl Students and Maulana Azad Literacy Award are being implemented since 200304. The Foundation has enhanced the total number of Scholarships to be given to meritorious girl students belonging to minorities from 1200 to 3000. During the year 2004-05, the Foundation has sanctioned scholarship of Rs.10,000 each to 2774 girl students from 22 States during 2004-05. For the first time three hundred scholarships were distributed in the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Under the scheme of Maulana Azad Literacy Award, the Foundation has selected following three NGOs for their outstanding performance in the field of promoting education amongst the educationally backward minorities: (i) Marwar Education Society, Jodhpur (Rajasthan) (ii) Farook College, Calicut (Kerala) (iii) Maharashtra Cosmopolitan Education Society, Pune (Maharashtra) The foundation has also successfully organized in-service Teachers Training Programmes at the following three places :
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