Nodal Committee Formed
By Maqbool Ahmed Siraj
Kolkata: The two-day Educational Conference of Eastern and North-Eastern States held here on October 26-27, decided to set up a nodal committee to select, send and enroll 200 Muslim students on merit-cum-means basis into professional educational institutions run by the Muslim minority in four southern states and Maharashtra.
The nodal committee will be headed by Dr. Fazal Ghafoor, secretary of the Muslim Educational Society, Kerala.
The decision was taken following a suggestion by Mr. Peerpasha Inamdar, President of the Cosmopolitan Education Society of Pune who proposed that Muslim students deprived of opportunities of higher education and professional and technical education in the states of Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand, Assam and all other North Eastern states avail of excess seats in several engineering and medical colleges, polytechnics, ITIs, nursing, pharmacy, law colleges established by the Muslim minority in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra. Dr. Fazal Ghafoor and Dr. Mumtaz Ahmed Khan, founder of the Al-Ameen Educational Society immediately endorsed the proposal and said their portals will be opened for admission to students from West Bengal and other eastern and north-eastern states.
An informal meeting held to consider the proposal decided that a group of educational activists from the Eastern and North-eastern states would first tour the southern states in order to visit the institutions, interact with the administration and assess the expenses, curriculum, language formula, medium of instruction, lodging and board facilities, climatic factors and accessibility etc. The visit will take place around December this year and the preparations to select students and working out modalities to enroll and admit them into professional educational colleges would be worked out in consultation with the heads of the institutions in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, cities of Kerala etc in January and February 2014.
Mr. Haroon Rasheed, educational activist from Murshidabad who is coordinating the effort from West Bengal told Islamic Voice that a team comprising members from the Eastern and North-Eastern States is being formed to visit the southern states. He said he along with Mr. Ashfaq Karim of Karim City College from Jamshedpur (Jharkhand); Nasir Ahmed from Kolkata, businesswoman Afroze Randerian from Kolkata; social activist Babul Ali from Guwahati; Prof. P. K. Abdul Azis, vice chancellor, University of Science Technology, Meghalaya (ex vice chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University) ; journalist Sheikh Quriesh from Cuttack; Haji Shamsuddin from Manipur, and a few others will be on the team to visit the southern states.
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