Direct intervention by the government is needed to solve the Tamil schools' dismal academic performance, a Tamil education activist told malaysiakini today.

"Survey and research won't work. We need to take affirmative and positive actions before the problem that only affects the Indian community becomes a national problem," said S. Pasupathy, an educationist for 20 years.

He was commenting on the report by The Sun yesterday, which quoted Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) president, Samy Vellu, as saying that a plan to improve the standards of the country's 527 Tamil schools will be submitted to the Cabinet by October.

Samy, who is also the Works Minister, said the plan will be prepared by educationists and other experts and will be sustainable for the next 25 years.

He said apart from upgrading infrastructure, focus will be given on the academic performance of the nation's 97,000 Tamil school pupils.

Last year, the Tamil schools recorded only a 24.9 percent passes in " Penulisan Bahasa Malaysia " paper and 22 schools in Selangor recorded zero passes in the Standard 6 assessment test, UPSR.

Active for the past two decades in monitoring Tamil schools, Pasupathy has his reservations on the need to carry out more reports and studies.

Five to six years ago, the Ministry of Education (under Najib Tun Razak) had conducted a study on the Tamil schools, he said.

"The study found several factors that affected the performance of Tamil schools' pupils. First, it's the socio-economic background of the Tamil pupils themselves. Second, their lower socio-economic status also contributed weaker health," added Pasupathy.

He said that the weak academic performance of the Tamil schools is an indication of the bigger underlying socio-economic problems faced by the Indian community.

"Besides, the study also indicated that the Tamil school headmasters were not visionary and the teachers were not properly trained," he said.

According to him, the results of the study to investigate the dismal performance of Tamil schools was made public six years ago.

He urged the MIC chief to get the report from Ministry of Education.

"The MIC organised leadership seminars for headmasters in Port Dickson after that but nothing substantial was implemented to tackled the whole issue," he said, stressing the need for a more pro-active involvement from the government.

"The Tamil schools need to be converted to become ' sekolah bantuan penuh ' (government-aided schools). Out of a total of 527 Tamil schools nationwide, only 60 are fully government-aided," lamented Pasupathy.