IMPHAL, May 04: Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley today raised the development issues of the Northeast, during his calling attention motion on racial profiling faced by students from North East.
Recalling the Partition the BJP leader said, ‘With the carving out of East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh, it moved away almost a thousand kilometres in terms of distance. Now, the impact of this was that the developmental activities in the North-East have considerably suffered.’
He said, the North-East also has a genuine complaint that certain Central Schemes and projects are endeavored to assist them and various things have not really lived up to the mark.
Jaitley further said,‘The educational infrastructure in the North-East has also suffered. I have been going through certain reports of studies which have been conducted with regard to educational institutions which we have established in the North-East. In which they have said syllabus has not been updated for more than ten years, number of new courses have not been added, institute-industry interaction is not taking place, flight of faculty is taking place and adequate faculty is not available, quality and quantity of qualified faculty is declining at an alarming rate, number of PhD holders have been reduced to minority in many cases, placement of students with industry becomes a weak thing. Now, all these factors have, therefore, contributed to really a large number of North Eastern students wanting to go to other parts of the country for education.’
The opposition leader called upon the Home Minister to look into the pending developmental activities, specially their roads, their railways, their connectivity, improvement in their educational institutions, etc.