New Delhi, June 22 (IANS) The cabinet Thursday approved the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's 15-point Programme for the Welfare of Minorities that addresses their concerns in critical areas like education, habitat and communal violence.

The cabinet also decided that 15 percent of the funds might be earmarked, wherever possible in relevant schemes, for minorities as Muslims, Christians, Jains and Parsis.

The programme was originally formulated by then prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1983 and sent to chief ministers two years later by then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi for state-level implementation.

The programme was later recast to focus action on issues intimately linked with social, educational and economic uplift of minorities and earmark outlays in schemes where progress can be monitored, an official statement said.

The decision to amend the programme was taken at a cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister.

The points in the new programme include equitable availability of Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), improving access to school education, greater resources for teaching Urdu language, modernising education in madrassas and extending scholarships to meritorious students.

It promises self-employment and wage employment for the poor, upgradation of skills through technical training, enhanced credit support for economic activities and recruitment to state and central government services.

The programme intends to improve the living conditions of minorities by giving them equitable share in rural housing and sprucing up shantytowns inhabited by them.

It also seeks to prevent communal riots, prosecute perpetrators of communal offences and rehabilitate victims of such violence in a more concerted way.