Gujarat Chief Minister Vijaybhai Rupani on Friday launched the annual primary school enrolment drive, ‘Shala Praveshotsav’ and ‘Gunotsav’, from a non-descript Govindi village in tribal dominated Panchmahals district.
CM Rupani took random tests of students in reading, writing and arithmetic. He held consultation with the school management and distributed national scholarships to meritorious students.
Speaking on the occasion, he said that enrolment drive launched 15 years ago has reached 99 per cent of the target while the dropout rate has come down from 30 per cent to 1.60 per cent over this period. As to literacy rate, he said it has increased from 50 per cent to 75 per cent. The target is 100 per cent.
The simultaneous drive for qualitative improvement has resulted in the increase in number of ‘A+’ grade schools from 5 (five) to 2,117 and ‘A’ grade from 3,823 to 12,556, while the number of ‘B’ grade dropped from 12,883 to 1,613 and ‘D’ grade from 14,582 to 300. The number speaks for the success of Gunotsav.
He said that his Government spent Rs 25,000-crore annually on education from kindergarten to postgraduate (KG2PG) level in the state, to make learning simple and world-class, right up to the remote areas.
He said that his Government planned to make all classrooms in the state virtual smart classrooms in five years, replacing blackboards into palmtops, alongside improving the physical infrastructure in schools and taking care of health and hygiene of students. He also plans to test students’ talents from Standard 2 to 8 through Optical Mark Recognition (OMR).