Though students’ enrollment among children aged between 6-14 years in rural areas has increased to 96.2 per cent in the State but still, a large chunk of them are struggling to develop reading and mathematics skills.
According to State Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2013, released by United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Jharkhand Chief, Job Zachariah on Sunday at a hotel here, learning skill of the students has shown a decline as far as mathematics and reading are concerned among students enrolled with both the Government and private schools in the rural area of the State. The data was compiled from as many as 683 villages of 23 districts among 29,400 students. The report suggests that 53.8 per cent students of class-I cannot read letters while only 9.8 per cent students were able to identify words.
Interestingly, as many as 48.9 per cent students from class-I could not recognize numbers from 1to 9. While only 3.6 per cent students can solve simple subtraction problem. Pratham State head Kumar Katyayani throwing light on the reason behind dip in learning capacities of the rural area student which the survey team came across said, “Staff crunch in government schools has been identified as major reason behind the poor graph. Majority of the schools do not have teachers while some have only two to three teachers for class I to VIII. People Teacher Ratio (PTR) of the year 2013 is only 19 per cent. It is direst need of the hour to focus in this direction.”
In a bid to understand the problems root cause members of Jharkhand Education Project Council (JEPC) and Pratham with support from UNICEF commenced a programme name, ‘Ab Padhna Pakka’ (now education confirm) in three districts (Giridih, Ranchi and East Singhbum). The basic idea is to dig out the problem behind it and accordingly find a way to curb the learning and reading problem of the students.
UNICEF Education Specialist Vinay Pattanayak sharing information about the same said, “We have conducted surveys and analyzed that if students are provided adequate resources then their performance graph will show a rising trend. For couple of months some students were taught English alphabets and Hindi letters by trained teachers and to check the result of the effort a test was conducted to our surprise we found that 80 per cent of the students came out with flying colours.”
Echoing him, Job Zachariah said, “We are ready to provide our support in conducting these programmes in other districts as well. The concerned department and Government should also show equal interest in this direction.”