Date:- 11.12.2022 –
Sourav Ghosh, the General Secretary of AIDSO has issued the following Press Statement on the decision to discontinue the Maulana Azad National Fellowship.
The central government has decided to discontinue the Maulana Azad National Fellowship (MANF), a scholarship for the minority students. We all are well aware of the miserable condition of various fellowships provided in our country. Like many other fellowships, MANF has also been irregular and delay in availing for a very long time. In fact, many students raised their doubts over the discontinuation of the fellowship. Unfortunetly the government without addressing the irregularities atlast has declared to stop the fellowship. We remember that the government had also attempted to stop the Non-NET fellowship in the past. DS Kothari postdoctoral fellowship had been stopped for two years during Covid. Apart from MANF, the prestigious KVPY fellowship and several school level scholarships, in particular the Pre-Matric scholarship for class 1 to 8 has been stopped and national Scheme of Incentives for girls were either discontinued or severely curtailed by the central government. We are also observing that the government is gradually curtailing the union budget on education every year. On the other hand time and again the students were demanding to regularise the fellowships but the government viciously always kept the students in dark.
All these steps are in fact the part and parcel of the implementation of the National Education Policy 2020, which intends to privatise the entire education sector and poses grave threat to the entire field of research and scientific temper. It is creating a grave crisis for the students in general and the research scholar community in particular. With each passing days, these policies of curtailment is aggravating day by day. If this goes on unabated, thousands of students will be eliminated from the research field.
All India Democratic Students’ Organisation, AIDSO All India Committee condemns this deliberate attack on the research field and on the critical thinking faculty of the society. We call upon the students as well as all the education loving people to stand united against these anti-education anti-research measures in order to save education and humanity. AIDSO also demands to revoke the decision to stop Maulana Azad National Fellowship, regularise all the fellowships and scholarships including Non-NET, NFSC, DS Kothari, KVPY, Pre-Matric, Incentive for Girls, etc., increase the number of beneficiaries, allocate 10% of the public budget for education and research and stop privatisation of education.
