Patna: Piyush Anand, a 28-year-old OBC student from Bihar, secured admission into the prestigious SOAS University of London for an LLM degree last year. But he is still in India. He has met politicians, government officials, activists, and even ran a social media campaign for funding.
Bihar doesn’t have a budget to support OBC students wanting to study abroad.
“I sent an application to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, met JDU workers, and tried to meet Tejashwi Yadav, but I didn’t get any help from anywhere,” says Anand, showing copies of his applications. “Now the government is talking about formulating a scholarship policy for OBC communities.”
But Anand is worried that by the time the policy is rolled out, he would have missed the opportunity to study in London. Over the past year, the Bihar government has been promoting this policy on social media, but no formal announcement has been made yet.
“Our government will send the top 100 students of Bihar’s universities abroad for higher education,” read one such post on the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)’s Facebook page.
Among the states in the country, Jharkhand, Kerala, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra provide scholarships to OBC students going abroad, but Bihar nor Uttar Pradesh are not on the list. These two states, which had long-running governments led by OBC leaders of RJD and Samajwadi Party, are lagging behind in this scheme.
Neighbouring Jharkhand began funding students from tribal communities with the launch of the ‘Marang Gomke Jaipal Singh Munda Overseas Scholarship’ for the 2021-22 academic year, but by 2022, the eligibility was expanded to include candidates from minority OBC and Scheduled Caste communities. Under this scholarship, 25 students were sent abroad last year to study, with their air tickets and university tuition fees covered.
Although Rajasthan doesn’t have specific scholarships for OBCs, it introduced the need-based Rajiv Gandhi Scholarship for Academic Excellence Yojana in 2021. This scholarship is open to students across all categories and covers 150 universities in the US, UK, and other countries. Permanent residents of the state with annual family income of Rs 25 lakh are eligible to apply. This year, as many as 245 students have benefitted from the scheme.
But critics claim that the scheme favours children of civil servants.
“Seats are not reserved for SC, ST, OBC in this scheme. Children of officers are going to study abroad with government help,” claimed Bhatta Ram, former president of the Students’ Union at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, who had written to the Rajasthan government about this issue last year.
In Kerala, OBC students who have secured admission in postgraduate courses in foreign universities can receive a maximum of Rs 10 lakh each under the backward classes development department’s Overseas Scholarship.
For now, eligible students from states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh can apply for the central government’s National Overseas Scholarship Scheme, which is open to SC, Denotified Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes, landless agricultural labourers, and traditional artisan communities. However, it does not include OBCs. Thirty per cent of the seats are reserved for women.
Under this scheme, the central government covers the cost of tuition fees, accommodation, and air travel for 125 students, with 115 of them belonging to the Scheduled Castes.
For aspirants like Anand, Bihar’s lack of similar funding opportunities is frustrating and demoralising. Last year, he even petitioned state education minister Chandrashekhar Yadav.
“Some state governments are running scholarship schemes to provide equal opportunities for higher education abroad to the students of their state. Bihar should also start such a scheme. At least 100 students should be sent for studies abroad,” he wrote in his petition.
Anand is still waiting to hear back from the minister’s office.
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Elsewhere, lives are changing
In the OBC politics and affirmative action spectrum, studying abroad is an especially important aspiration among the middle classes.
Akanksha, who received a scholarship from the Jharkhand government the year it was launched, returned to India last year after completing her master’s in climate change science and management from Loughborough University in England. She is now based in Ranchi, working as a research associate with the Delhi-headquartered think tank, iForest or International Form for Environment, Sustainability and Technology.
As a member of the Scheduled Tribe (ST) community, studying abroad was once a fantasy for Akanksha until she read a newspaper report about the Jharkhand’s government’s scholarship scheme. It gave wings to her dreams. She was among the first batch of five students to secure a place and hasn’t looked back since.
“Such schemes are very important for students like me coming from the tribal and backward communities. We do not have enough money to go abroad, and our admissions go to waste,” said Akanksha.
Another beneficiary of the Jharkhand government’s scheme is Hammad Ahmed Ansari from Ranchi—who belongs to the weavers’ community (Julaha Momin). He is currently completing his LLM in the UK as an OBC category beneficiary of the Marang Gomke Jaipal Singh Munda Overseas Scholarship, which covers his expenses, rent, and tuition fees while studying international commercial law at the University of Warwick. It amounts to around Rs 50 lakh, he said.
When Ansari returns to Jharkhand with a loan-free LLM degree, he plans to explore opportunities to provide “quality legal education” to people from the SC, ST, and OBC communities, or anyone with limited resources.
“It’s a long road, but with the help of my peers and Allah’s blessings, I think I can make this happen,” he said.
Meanwhile, time is running out for Anand in Bihar. He deferred his admission by a year and paid Rs 2 lakh—a loan from a family friend—to hold his seat at SOAS. However, that was in 2022, and now he needs at least Rs 40 lakh by July to attend classes in this academic year. With each passing day, his joy of getting into SOAS is turning into bitterness.
“I had thought that within a year, I would receive some help from the government. One year will be over in July, and I will lose both my money and admission,” says Anand, sitting in his one-room house in Patna.
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Politics of noise, no sight of scheme
Anand’s efforts have sparked much discussion in the media regarding the government’s planned overseas fellowships for OBC students. One local newspaper even claimed that the government would provide fellowships to deserving students. “‘Students’ dream of studying abroad will be fulfilled, Bihar government will give loan of Rs 50 lakh’,” the headline grandly announced. Officials, however, immediately denied this.
“There is no such discussion happening now,” said Deepak Singh, principal secretary of Bihar’s ministry of education. He clarified that the Nitish Kumar government’s plan to introduce such a scheme is only in the initial stage.
“The framework has not been prepared yet. This is just an idea. We need to consider eligibility, who can apply, and how much money will be spent on each student. Initially, the amount will be limited. However, we need to see how many students apply. Nothing has been finalised yet,” said Singh.
Incidentally, Anand had also met Singh in September last year, but nothing has materialised thus far.
“I also sought help from the Chief Minister’s Fund but received no response,” Anand said in despair, his responses reflecting a litany of loss and longing. The principal secretary said he would raise the matter in the cabinet meeting.
Anand’s struggle exemplifies the chasm between politics and policy, and the opposition has been quick to underscore the discontent among aspiring students.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bihar has called it a “failure” of the Janata Dal-United (JDU).
“The grand alliance government had promised that scholarship or financial assistance would be given to EBC-OBC students studying abroad, but it seems to be just talk,” said Nikhil Anand, general secretary of the OBC wing of Bihar BJP. “If any community has been cheated the most by the JDU and RJD, it is the most backward and backward class—the victims of vote bank politics. Only Nitish Kumar is responsible.”
Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation (CPI(ML)) MLA Sandeep Saurav, who assisted Anand by connecting him to the education ministry and providing information about the CM’s fund, describes the absence of such scholarships as the state’s misfortune. “I tried to help Piyush Anand, but the government showed no interest in the matter,” he said.
In Uttar Pradesh, the promise of OBC scholarships became a talking point during the elections. In this season of discontent, a few postdoctoral fellows have been raising similar demands for OBC students.
“This issue of OBC overseas scholarship has not yet come to our notice, but work should be done on it. If OBCs are to be integrated into the mainstream, such policies are very important,” said Samajwadi Party spokesperson Abdul Hafeez.
The issue was included in the manifesto of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD). During an election rally in 2022, party chief Jayant Singh announced that a scholarship scheme would be launched for students from the SC/ST and OBC communities who gain admission to the top 500 universities in the world.
“When we were preparing our manifesto for the (2022 UP assembly) election, we consulted many experts. After discussing with them, we added this issue to our manifesto. The government must have a scheme to facilitate studying abroad. That’s why we included this scheme for OBC students,” Singh told ThePrint.
However, he admitted that there is currently no such plan in Uttar Pradesh. “We are not even in the government. We will raise this issue in the assembly session and put pressure on the (Yogi Adityanath) government,” he added.
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Sole option, except for OBCs
Now, there is a growing demand for including OBCs in the scheme offered by the Centre and increasing the number of beneficiaries.
“Last year in London, I wrote a letter to Rahul Gandhi and Tejashwi Yadav about this. I demanded that the number of seats should be increased to 1,000. We also demanded the inclusion of OBC, Nomadic Tribes, and Denotified Tribes,” said Raju Kendre, founder and CEO of the Eklavya India Foundation, which works with students from marginalised communities to help them study in India’s premier educational institutions. He recently launched the Eklavya Global Scholars’ Program (GSP) and mentored around 60 students, 40 of whom secured admission in 2022-23 in top universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, LSE in the UK, and Columbia in the US.
The Jharkhand government’s scholarship has opened up a whole new world for Ansari. What has impressed him the most is the education system and the willingness of professors to listen to what he has to say.
“They want to know a student’s viewpoint, and we are marked based on that. We have long interactive seminars. This is rare in India,” said Ansari, who aspires to become a professor of law. He misses India, and is looking forward to returning to Jharkhand so that he could give back to the community.
“This scholarship is the future of India,” he said.
(Edited by Prashant)