The Leader of Opposition in Delhi Assembly Ramvir Singh Bidhuri on Sunday slammed the AAP Government over the education model and said that the model is misleading the people of the national Capital.
Addressing the media, Bidhuri challenged the Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s over his claim that children are leaving private schools in Delhi and coming to government schools for education.
“The number of children in government schools has dropped by one lakh in the last seven years. Even out of the number of children coming to government schools, 40 percent are absent every day. In seven years, the number of children in Delhi’s private schools has also increased from 31 percent to 43 percent,” he claimed.
Bidhuri while citing the government data, said that the number of children in Delhi’s government schools was 16.1 lakh in 2013-14 but decreased to 15.1 lakh in 2019-20. If we look at the figures before 2013-14, every year the number of children in government schools was increasing by about 60 thousand, but after the coming of the Delhi government, the number of children in government schools started to decline.
“It came down to 15.4 lakhs in 2014-15, 15.1 lakhs in 2015-16, 15.3 lakhs in 2016-17, 14.6 lakhs in 2017-18, 14.9 lakhs in 2018-19 and 15.1 lakhs in 2019-20. After this, the schools remained closed due to Covid for two years. The remarkable thing is that the increase in the number of children in schools by 60 thousand per year never happened. If that regular increase is included then today the number of children in government schools should have been 20 lakhs whereas it is 15.1 lakhs,” he said.
Bidhuri also said that the Delhi government is misleading the public on the present number of children in the schools. If we look at the figures, there were a total of 14,56,313 lakh children in government schools in 2017-18, but out of them 5,67,816 children remained absent. It clearly indicates that 38.09 percent of the total number of children did not attend the schools. Similarly, 44.70 percent children were absent from schools in 2018-19. In 2019-20, this number stood at 39.35 percent. This means that the number of children reported in schools is actually about 40 percent less than that.