TED Newsdesk, JAIPUR: The Rajasthan government will provide free coaching through renowned institutes to civil services aspirants. These aspirants belong to various tribes and the Sahariya community, Minister of State for Tribal and Regional Development Arjun Bamania said on Thursday.
In brief: TAD Super-30, Rajasthan’s new plan for civil service aspirants, lets candidates from the Sahariya community and students from other scheduled tribes compete for 30 free coaching places, with 10 of them reserved for women.
In a move straight out of the much-touted Super-30 of Bihar’s Anand Kumar, the TAD Super-30 project will start under the budget announced to provide free coaching to students preparing for competitive examinations conducted by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) and the Rajasthan Public Service Commission (RPSC).
Thirty selected aspirants, 20 men and 10 women, will be provided with online coaching facilities to prepare for the civil services examinations, the Minister said in a statement. Many prestigious institutes of Rajasthan will coach the aspirants, he added.
TAD Super-30 for civil service aspirants: who the scheme is for
TAD is the state’s Tribal Area Development department, and the scheme’s name borrows the Super-30 label made famous in Bihar. Its specific mention of the Sahariya community is significant. The Sahariya, written Saharia in central government records, are the only Rajasthan group on the Ministry of Tribal Affairs’ list of 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, the category the Centre reserves for the most disadvantaged tribal communities in the country.
The ministry describes such groups by a set of features: dependence on hunting and gathering for food, a pre-agricultural level of technology, zero or negative population growth, economic backwardness and an extremely low level of literacy. For civil service aspirants from the Sahariya community, that background makes the scheme’s entry conditions demanding. Candidates need a graduate degree with at least 60 per cent, a scheduled tribe certificate and their own equipment for online classes, which the minister listed as a condition of entry.
The coaching itself is to be delivered online by established institutes in the state, according to the minister’s statement. The places are split by gender, with 20 for men and 10 for women, and the target examinations are those of both the Union Public Service Commission, which recruits for the all-India services, and the Rajasthan Public Service Commission, which recruits for the state’s own administrative and allied services.
He said that to benefit from the scheme, candidates must secure no less than 60% marks in their graduate programmes. Besides, it is necessary to have the required ST certificate and the availability of necessary equipment for online coaching facilities.
The minister hoped that this move will improve the educational, economic and social status of the aspirants, and also help aspirants play a major role in the development of India and their state.
The numbers behind the scheme
Rajasthan has a large tribal population for a 30-seat scheme to serve. According to the Census 2011 figures compiled by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in its Statistical Profile of Scheduled Tribes in India, the state had about 92.39 lakh people from scheduled tribes, 13.5 per cent of its population of 685.48 lakh.
The same publication shows how far behind tribal literacy in the state remained. The literacy rate among scheduled tribes in Rajasthan was 52.8 per cent in 2011, against 59 per cent for scheduled tribes across India. Thirty coaching places is a small number against those figures. The scheme is open only to tribal graduates who scored at least 60 per cent in their degrees, and the minister’s statement gave no estimate of how many young people in the state meet that bar or how many applications the department expected.
The minister did not name the institutes that would take part, or say how the 30 students would be selected from among those who met the 60 per cent bar, in the statement reported on Thursday.
What has happened since
Three years after the state announced its TAD Super-30 plan for civil service aspirants, Sahariya community households became one of the targets of a national programme. On 15 November 2023 the Prime Minister announced the Pradhan Mantri Janjati Adivasi Nyaya Maha Abhiyan, known as PM JANMAN, for the 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, and the Union Cabinet approved it on 29 November 2023, according to a Press Information Bureau factsheet.
The factsheet put the PVTG population at over 28 lakh people in 7.12 lakh households, living in 22,544 villages and habitations across 220 districts in 18 states and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The mission has an estimated outlay of about Rs 24,000 crore, of which Rs 15,336 crore is the central share and Rs 8,768 crore the states’ share, spread over 11 interventions run by nine ministries. Education features directly: the plan provides for 500 hostels at Rs 2.75 crore each and vocational education and skilling in 60 aspirational PVTG blocks.
The mission grew out of an earlier promise. The factsheet notes that the Union Budget for 2023-24 had announced a Pradhan Mantri PVTG Development Mission to improve the social and economic conditions of these groups, and that PM JANMAN aims to bring PVTG households and habitations basic facilities including safe housing, clean drinking water, sanitation, better access to education, health and nutrition, road and telecom links, and sustainable livelihoods. Its targets include 4.90 lakh pucca houses at Rs 2.39 lakh each, 8,000 km of connecting roads and 1,000 mobile medical units, ten for each district.
The Education Daily could not find a published record of how many TAD Super-30 students went on to clear the UPSC or RPSC examinations. The state department’s website could not be reached when this story was updated.
