New Delhi, Nov. 11: Muslim girls are about three times less likely to go to college than Christian girls, the latest government data suggest, implying women may lag in education because of their community background as well as their gender.

About one in 17 Muslim girls goes to college against nearly one in 10 Hindu girls, one in eight Sikh girls and one in six Christian girls, the data collected by the University Grants Commission (UGC) show.

They also show that Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Class girls have poorer access to higher education than higher-caste girls.

Gender disparity is not new — 12.42 per cent of Indian boys enrol in college against 9.11 per cent of girls. Nor is community disparity — Muslims, SC/STs and the Other Backward Classes have traditionally had poorer access to education than higher-caste Hindus.

But the new data show stark caste and community-based differences even within an overarching gender disparity, suggesting that girls from backward communities face “double discrimination”, human resource development (HRD) ministry officials said.

The data further imply that the traditional imbalance in representation of Muslim, SC/ST or Other Backward Class students in higher education is only getting exaggerated further, a higher education official in the ministry said.

Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe girls are four times less likely to go to college than high-caste girls, indicating a widening of the gap despite quotas and scholarships, the official said.

Fewer than one in every 20 Scheduled Caste girls accesses higher education in India, compared with one in every five for girls from the higher castes, the data show. Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Class girls fare marginally better than their Scheduled Caste counterparts.

The statistics have been collated from UGC-sponsored studies that used fundamental data from the last National Sample Survey, 2004-05. The UGC today shared these data with the vice-chancellors of central universities and directors of institutes like the IITs and the IIMs.

India has 15 per cent reservation in higher education for Scheduled Caste students and another 7.5 per cent for the Scheduled Tribes. This year, reservations for Other Backward Class candidates were introduced — all central educational institutions have to reserve 27 per cent seats for them by 2010-11.

The Constitution doesn’t allow religion-based quotas, but the United Progressive Alliance has launched several schemes to help Muslims, especially girls, gain better access to higher education.

Under the eleventh five-year plan, the HRD ministry plans to build model colleges in each of 370 educationally backward districts. Many of these districts are minority-dominated.