Students protest scrapping of Maulana Azad National Fellowship for minority students

NEW DELHI: Dozens of students staged a protest outside the minority affairs ministry office against the central government's decision to discontinue the Maulana Azad National Fellowship (MANF) for minority students.

Last week, in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha, Minority Affairs Minister Smriti Irani announced the decision to discontinue the Maulana Azad National Fellowship from the 2022-23 academic session, saying it overlapped with various other fellowship schemes for higher education being implemented by the government.

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The Delhi unit of the Students' Federation of India (SFI), affiliated to the CPI(M), said it had protested against the decision outside the Ministry of Education earlier as well and its activists were detained then. Aishe Ghosh, vice president of SFI Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Students' Union president, said, "The fellowship was a lifeline to students from minority communities. It is only through schemes like these that numerous students from minority and financially weak backgrounds could get access to higher education."

Aseed Karim, Secretary, SFI Kamla Nagar Area Committee explained how a move like discontinuing MANF comes as a big blow to these students and shatters all hope to pursue higher education in the future. "Already multiple students have reported that due to the nine month delay in the disbursal of the fellowship, numerous students had to put a pause on their research work due to the increasing financial burden," he added.

The Jammu-Kashmir Student Federation also joined the nation wide protest along with multiple states. The JKSF said, "Scrapping the MANF fellowship shows how BJP government has dangerously intensified hatred against the minorities students in educational institutions."

Abhishek, SFI Delhi State Committee member, highlighted how scholarships like MANF have helped students coming from minority communities sustain to continue with their PhDs. The SFI stands in opposition to this arbitrary scrapping of MANF and pre-matric scholarship and demands that these scholarships be immediately reinstated. A delegation of six students from various campuses across Delhi met the deputy secretary of the Minority Affairs Ministry on Monday and handed over a memorandum for the same.