The UPA Government is ready to announce social welfare programmes which earmarks a percentage of the funds for minorities based upon their relative population.

Not only this, the plan, prepared by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, says that the schemes and funds shall be "further split state-wise for each minority community in the ratio of the populations of the minority community in each state."

The Supreme court has earlier disapproved of such a scheme arguing that: "Encouragement to such fissiparous tendencies would be a serious jolt to the secular structure of constitutional democracy...We should guard against making our country akin to a theocratic state based on multi-nationalism. Our concept of secularism is that ‘state’ shall have no religion"

IndianExpress reports.