Union govt. shows no bias in allocating funds to Tamil Nadu, says H. Raja 

The Union government shows no bias in allocating funds to Tamil Nadu and has released funds under 19 out of 20 heads for the School Education Department, said BJP leader H. Raja here on Thursday.

Speaking to media, Mr. Raja expressed concerns about the quality of existing infrastructure in government schools in Tamil Nadu and said the PM SHRI scheme was envisaged to improve the infrastructure of over 16,000 schools in India. He also said the Union government had released funds under 19 heads with respect to school education to Tamil Nadu. The State had only written to the Centre, expressing its willingness to join the PM SHRI scheme, however it had not signed the MoU. Funds under the scheme would be released only after signing the MoU, he said.

“The Congress party was a regressive force which left some States in India to remain backward for nearly 60 years. There is a vast difference between government and private schools in Tamil Nadu. The strength of students in over 1,300 government schools in the State are not even in double digits. The pass percentage in nearly 56 engineering colleges was less than 20%…The DMK government is attempting to create language barriers by talking about regressive policies,” he said.

When the Congress-DMK alliance was in power at the Centre between 2004 and 2014, the National Education Policy was about learning either Hindi or Sanskrit as the third language. However, in the New Education Policy of the Narendra Modi-led BJP government, a student can learn any Indian language as the third language in addition to mother tongue and English, he added.