The State Government of Kerala has begun a scholarship scheme for aviation students hailing from Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) communities.
K Radhakrishnan, State Minister for SC/ST said that the state government has decided to fund the entire fees of Aviation Courses in Kerala which comes to around INR 2.5 million for each student.
The government will bear the entire expenses of the SC and ST students who qualify in the entrance exams for admission in state-run Rajiv Gandhi Aviation Academy. The academy provides training for Commercial Pilot License (CPL)
Further, students belonging to the SC, ST category who get admission in Top Aviation Colleges in Kerala will be able to study for free of cost. This is because the scholarship is no longer limited to one or two students. It would be available to all the SC and ST students.
As per reports, the state SC/ST Minister had a meeting with two girls and three boys from the SC community who got admitted to the Rajiv Gandhi Aviation Academy. Following which he took to his social media account to announce that the new scheme will benefit upcoming generations of the SC and ST communities, who were earlier not allowed to study or educate themselves.
He advised the five successful students to be ideal role models for the SC/ST community. According to the reports, the students who got admission to the academy belonged to various districts of Kerala, including Wayanad, Kannur, Alappuzha, Kozhikode, and Thiruvananthapuram.
This has come to a point when the Post Matric Scholarship for the students from SC community was underfunded. The scholarship schemes to support and assist the historically marginalised dalit communities through the higher education are undergoing an insufficient budget allocation and under utilisation.
As per the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) report, the expenditure on the post-matric scholarship scheme has exceeded the budget allocation, which has resulted in the shortage of funds.
Over the decades, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MSJE) administered the budgets for scholarship schemes, who have either witnessed a marginal increase or no change at all.
However, the underfunding has affected the implementation of the SC and ST schemes, including scholarships, the NCDHR report revealed.
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