Kerala - Kochi   

Study on status of Muslims

KOCHI: The report of the Sachar committee on Muslim backwardness is a landmark record, in that it is for the first time that a governmental agency has documented, with statistics and scientific data, the horrible conditions in which 13 per cent of Indians live.

Predictably, the report received wide attention in Kerala, particularly from Muslim intellectuals, activists and academics.

This was natural because Kerala is said to be home to the largest number of literate Muslims in India. Kerala Muslims are better off than their counterparts in other States, but the fact remains that the community, which makes up one-fourth of the State’s population, lags far behind in terms of education, employment, economic prosperity, Government jobs, land holdings and a lot of other development parameters than, say, Christians who constitute only 19 per cent of the State’s population.

This developmental backwardness has been brought out in a new book, ‘Sacharinte Kerala Parisaram’ (The Kerala Context of Sachar), which is a collection of essays by leading Kerala intellectuals, including K.M. Panikkar, Zachariah and N.A. Kareem. Published by Other Books, ‘Sacharinte Kerala Parisaram’ was released by Abdul Ghafoor, former High Court judge, on Sunday during a discussion on the Sachar report in Kochi.

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