‘Study needed to identify genuine minority educational institutions’

Institutions are using the ‘minority’ tag to exploit minority rights to their advantage: Peter Alphonse

Congress leader and the newly appointed Chairman of the State Minorities Commission, Peter Alphonse, has made a strong case for assessing and scrutinising minority educational institutions to classify genuine institutions. In an interview, he said it had become fashionable for institutions run by individuals to use the ‘minority’ label to turn the rights of the minorities to their advantage. Edited excerpts: The Minorities Commission is a statutory entity established by a special statute to look after the socio-economic condition and cultural identities of religious and linguistic minorities. Religious minorities constitute 20% of the State’s population, and linguistic minorities another 20%. This is a substantial population, and our role is to act as a bridge between the government and the minorities. The commission is a goodwill ambassador of Chief Minister M.K. Stalin to them. While the government has a lot of schemes, the minorities have special requests and needs. It is our job to see to it that these schemes reach the real beneficiaries and bring their demands and requests to the government’s attention. Apart from these tasks, we have the powers of a civil court and can summon officials when an individual or a community has a genuine grievance. We can visit the affected individual or areas and make inquiries and recommend redressal measures to the government.