Long back Sachar Committee had placed Bengal in the category of ‘worst performing states’. While refusing to accept the committee’s argument, the Left Front acknowledged that the Sachar report had hit the Left coalition, both in the 2009 Lok Sabha and the 2011 assembly polls.
The Front, which almost always had an unflinching support of Muslims, lost the minority votes, and the leaders partly blamed the report for losing the traditional base, while one must admit that the Sachar Committee report was based largely on secondary information.
Our ma-mati-manus Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has claimed that “90% work to improve the condition of Muslims, which constitute 25% of the population in Bengal, has been completed”.
Recently one study was conducted by more than 250 field researchers and activists of the NGOs Association SNAP and Guidance Guild involving one lakh households .The most comprehensive and authentic survey has revealed that not much has changed even after ‘poribartan’.
The survey revealed that 17.59% Muslims are illiterate and 52% do not go beyond primary education. Only 4.85% cross the graduation level and a meager 1.86% go on to complete post-graduation. Only 0.4% of the community can access “socially preferred professions such as medicine, law or engineering”.
The survey report has revelled much worst related conditions in areas dominated by Muslims ,as these Muslim dominated are lagging behind in terms of basic infrastructure, while 27% roads in these hamlets remain waterlogged, 18% are dirt tracks, not even suitable for cycling.
More pathetic, the report suggests that water supply was found to be highly inadequate in terms of access, quantity as well as quality. It details that when 7.82% of the population in the state has no access to electricity; of this 8.19% are Muslim also 30% villages have no irrigation facility.
The report on minority dominated ares says that as high as 35% villagers have to commute at least 4km to access health facility; for 12%, it is 8km or more. Many of the public health centres merely exist.Some are simply defunct buildings, 46% have no doctors, 75% have no beds, leaving 45% of the community to heavily depend on quacks.
The report which was reported widely in news media further highlighted that almost a decade after the Sachar report, 80% of Muslim households depend on manual labour for livelihood and members of one fifth of the households are illiterate in the state of Bengal where Muslims constitute approximately 25-26% of the population.It explains that more than 90% of rural Muslims are Bengali-speaking, a language similar to the neighbour country Bangladesh, while only a tiny section reported Urdu to be their mother tongue.
CHANGING BENGAL argues that though Bengal has almost no record of large-scale communal violence over the decades as rural Bengal could largely protect itself from communal conflicts because of its social fabric where Hindus and Muslims live close to each other and share to a large extent many social practises and norms of livelihood, language and culture.
But CHANGING BENGAL asks a humble question, if the repeated governments in Bengal have been protecting the minority Muslims only to deprive them from the most basic human needs a resident of the country is eligible to get and thus torture and humiliate them as most underprivileged community in the state and society.
The report is much serious and "we" as the well wisher of "ma-mati manus theme" are doing a crime by neglecting a huge part of our population, but still winning their support in election proudly. Is not this a pure cheating to them ?