Dept agrees to fill all 1,500 matriculation seats

All 1,500 matriculation seats will be given to Indian students and the Matriculation Department will update the Indian NGOs on the matter.

PUTRAJAYA: The Matriculation Department has agreed to fill all the 1,500 seats allocated for Indian students this year.

The assurance was given at a meeting between the department officials and Indian non-governmental organisations at the Education Ministry here.

Malaysian Indian Education Awareness and Welfare Association (PKP-KIM) president A Thiruvengadam said the department had also agreed to looking into the list of 333 students submitted today.

He thanked the department and the Education Ministry for meeting the association’s members to discuss the matter.

Thiruvengadam said the department’s assistant director-general, Sukor Beram, had promised to update the NGOs on the matter on Monday.

The matriculation seat allocation became an issue after the ministry announced that only 892 Indian students were registered to undertake matriculation programmes at government higher learning centres this year.

This is despite the government promising 1,500 matriculation seats for Indians annually.

“More than 6,000 students applied for the 1,500 places but only 892 seats were made available. We have also told the ministry officials that we want all 1,500 seats filled,” said Thiruvengadam.

He said he was disappointed with the MIC and its ministers for not taking any action on the issue.

“The Matriculation Department and Education Ministry officers said that they did not receive any name list from the MIC,” he added.

“This is a real embarrassment for the Indian community. We submitted three sets of the list to the MIC, Health Minister Dr S Subramaniam and Deputy Education Minister P Kamalanathan,” said Thiruvengadam.

“Both the leaders did not even give the lists to the government, then how can we expect the government to help us.

“This shows that these two MIC leaders are not interested in solving our problem. For them, may be only position matters,” he added.