Students' enrollment dwindles: the vanishing tribe
Hyderabad: The recent Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2019-20 report by the Union Ministry of Education's Department of School Education and Literacy has shown that the students' numbers are dwindling as they move to next higher classes. The million-dollar question that remains are where is the students vanishing as they move from primary class to higher classes.
Analysis of the report of 2091-20 by The Hans India has revealed a huge difference in the numbers of students, as per the data the number of students enrolled in the primary classes are 31, 101, 54 but as they get promoted to the upper primary classes the number stands out as 17, 240, 60 and the numbers continue to shrink to 1 Lakh-739,222 for secondary classes and Higher level education (11-12), of a total of 6,937,640. The report clearly shows that Education department is only making efforts to retain students only up to class 10.
Pointing out the reason behind the difference in the statistics in the report, according to the sources, several factors have attributed to the disappearance of students; one of they being is the compulsory link of Aadhar identification details of each student should be enrolled in the UIDISE+ data.
Another reason, every year nearly 6.25 lakh students sit for the class 10 board examinations and only a fee of around 4 lakh pass the examination. "Statistics are dynamic and have chances of manipulation citing various reasons." said a senior official of Telangana School Education Department (TSED). Looking at one data of the report, a total of 2,837,635 students enrolled in a government school, of which primary classes have 11,62,385 students, however, the students seem to vanish as they reach the higher education as the number comes down to 234,533. The overall number of students in other schools as per the report from primary to higher education is 11,494, but as it reached secondary and higher the numbers are shocking as they trickle between 66-0. While the number of higher secondary schools across the state are 2,431.
Adding, the sources also said that many in government schools and other schools have higher dropout rates as they move to the higher education level. During the rationalisation of teachers by the State government taking account of the teachers and student ratio, the teachers enrol students to safeguard their post, said the source.