Thank you Madam Chair, today on this Forum I am representing the largest religious minority in India which is the Muslim community. For a long time the discourse around the community development pretty much revolved around the religious framework, nobody giving serious thought to the development status of the community. In March 2005, Prime Minister Doctor Manmohan Singh established a seven member committee under the chairmanship of Honourable Justice Rajinder Sachar with a mandate to provide a comprehensive report about the social, economical and educational status of Muslim community. The committee presented its report properly known as Sachar Committee Report in 2006 which has been a landmark document in several respects. The wealth of data contained in the report provide concrete and irrefutable evidence that Muslims in India lag beyong with regard all socio-economic indicators. It highlights the fact that the growing stereotyping and negative impact of commual tension has increasingly compelled the Muslim community to aliente from others and retreat into religious and community spaces. Neglecting this fact the fundamentalists are raising their agrument that it is the community itself that does not want to be mainstreamed. This report and other data sources, made the central government realise the need to focus on providing resources and enhancing the capacities of the Muslims so as to enable their access to education, employment and government schemes and programmes. Hence the government started various initiatives to implement the recommendation of the Sachar committee. Consequently the ministry of minority affairs was established to look into the matters of the minorities and specific funds were allocated for the utilisation of their development. The Prime Minister initiated and in some cases relaunched various programmes and schemes such as 15 point programme, multi-sectoral programme and scholarship programme focusing on improving Muslim communities social, economical and educational status. However though on paper these efforts seem worthwhile and [...] implementation is still something that needs to be closely monitored. It is a herculan task for those that want to avail of the benefit of these schemes, here I would like to share one example to substantiate my point. A friend of mine who has a lucrative job in cosmopolitan city left the job and started a school for working in a religious mode which provides modern education as well as religious education in Lakno city. It caters to 200 children living in slum areas and coming from very poverty striken families, she tried to access scholarship schemeframe for minority advancement for these children but when she approached the district minority officer the clerk looking after the scholarship programme asks a given percentage on every scholarship fund, she tried to reason with him but as he was adamant she left feeling disgusted and frustrated as there is no agency where one could redress this blatant and on the face corruption. It is interesting to note that the fundamentalist always allege Muslim appeasement as on paper there are so many schemes and programmes for the development of Muslim community with billions of money budgeted into it. Yet the fact remains that the governments of the so-called Muslim, pro Muslim and secular regime is such that they are unable to deliver the benefit of these schemes to the targeted people. This situation puts the community in a very peculiar spot, on one side we have political parties who are supposedly pro-Muslim who on paper have designed attractive programmes