The much-touted ‘school enrollment week’ of education department proved to be a damp squib as very few admissions took place in the primary and the upper primary schools of the State during the campaign.
Despite stress on new admissions in the Government schools, only 5763 children could be enrolled in 17673 schools of the state. The red faced department officials are now trying to find reason for the failure of the campaign.
Emboldened by the success of the similar drive titled ‘Jan Jan Ka Prayas — Shiksha Ka Vikas’, which was initiated on April 06, when more than 25,000 new admissions were done in a single day, the department officials thought that a similar drive stretching to an entire week would produce wonderful results.
The declining number of students in the Government schools of the state is a factor of big worry for the department.
The data available with the department reflects that Plain districts like Udham Singh Nagar, Haridwar, and Dehradun districts have a lion’s share of the new admission (see table), thus highlighting the problem of less student strength in the mountainous areas.
The Primary Education Director, Seema Jaunsari told The Pioneer that the number of new admissions in the schools during the week was much below the expected figures.
She said that the reasons for low number of enrollment would be looked into.
One of a senior department officials said that the seriousness and efforts put in during one day drive on April 06 was missing this time. The Education Minister, Mantri Prasad Naithani himself took the lead in the April 06 drive.
On this day the department ensured such coordination with the district administration that at least one senior officer visited the school however remote it was to check the preparedness.
One of a school teacher posted in the Raipur block of Dehradun said that the senior department officials were not too serious this time. He said that rural population in mountainous districts is declining due to which schools located there are facing the problem of less student number. The department had asked the teachers to focus on 6 to 14 age group children and inform the benefits like Mid Day Meal (MDM), free textbooks, free uniforms and better qualification of teachers in the Government schools to their parents.
The teachers were supposed to inform co-curricular activities, sports, scholarship programmes, computer education and Child health programmes to the common people during the campaign to make them send their wards in the Government schools.
The failure of the enrollment week would now force the department officials to think something out of box to stem the rot of declining student strength in the Government schools.
Various data suggest that private schools are fast catching up with the Government schools even in rural areas despite of the fact that the State Government has doubled the budget on education since 2009.