In spite of following the Apex Court guidelines on providing quality education to the Below Poverty line (BPl) children in private schools at elementary stage under the 25 per cent reservation provision still 350 seats are vacant in Capital city at private schools despite making several attempts.
Out of 852 total seats reserved for underprivileged children in 56 private schools functioning in Ranchi, this year too administration have failed to achieve the set target of enrolling maximum number of downtrodden kids in the private cradles under the Right to Education (RTE) norms. The Act envisages that all poor children aged 6 to 14 years must be given free and compulsory education within their surrounding area.
While the district administration have made arrangements like camps facility, eased norms for getting application forms beside setting up a separate camp on premises of different private schools to enroll BPl kids within 1 km radius or in the neighborhood school, the result is yet not so encouraging.
Moreover, besides engaging several stakeholders in the enrollment drive, the administration had set the target of enrolling around 700 BPl kids at primary level in different schools in 2017.
“In the first phase, this year, we received 300 application forms from the BPl kids’ guardian. We were expecting better results from our camp initiative programme but here too 250 applicants approached us. After verification, 323 applications have been short listed,” said, DSE Ranchi, Shivendra Kumar.
Notably, in 2015, approximately 350 BPl students were admitted in private cradles whereas in 2016 despite involving few NGOs, conducting workshops, the administration was just able to register 314 children in 51 private schools. The DSE has also said that unavailability of proper documents with the parents is the biggest obstacle in admitting the deprived kids in private schools.
Documents like income, caste, distance, municipal, birth certificates including Aadhar card and electricity bill is mandatory for getting the admission forms of private schools and are scrutinized at different level before they are sent to the respective private school managements.
Soon after compilation of all figures, the report on the status of BPl children admission will be submitted to the Ranchi DC. “Before submitting the final report, the committee formed under DSE, District Welfare Officer (DWO), Block Education Officer (BEO) and others will conduct a meeting for further action plan. However, at present, we have decided to conduct door to door campaign for increasing the enrollment ratio looking at the response of the people especially in the slum areas,” added Kumar.