NEW DELHI, Jan. 27, 2020 : As the world celebrates the International Day of Education on 24th January, a close look at India’s education status reveals that the nation with the largest child population (39% of the overall population) is yet to reach the goal of universalised education.
According to the U-DISE 2016-2017 (Unified District Information System for Education – a consolidated database of information about schools in India) data, while the country improved a lot in terms of enrolling children to schools, annual dropout rate (19.89%) is still worrying at secondary and higher secondary levels.
As India’s Right to Education (RTE) Act 2009 ensuring free and quality education to children within 6 to 14 years completes a decade, the Gross Enrolment Ratio indicating the general level of participation per stage of school education surpasses 95% at the primary level.
However, the scenario degrades at upper primary and secondary levels as gross enrolment ratio comes down to less than 80% at the secondary level, and at higher secondary level it plummets to 55%, thus clearly indicating a worrisome trend of poor retention of children as they climb the educational ladder.
Government department in charge of education (Ministry of Human Resource Department) presents a grim picture of availability of qualified and trained teachers, as a little above 80% of teachers are duly trained with professional qualifications. Also, one third (34%) of schools do not have adequate numbers of teachers as per standard norms.
In the last 40 years, CRY – Child Rights and You has been working relentlessly towards ensuring that children who dropped out are re-enrolled to schools.
Puja Marwaha, the CEO at CRY said, “In our intervention areas efforts are taken to make schools compliant with all basic infra-structural facilities, ensure that they are running well, and there is access to education at all levels.”
“The coming decade will see the biggest cohort of India’s children slowly move into adulthood and allocating adequate resources to build their future would certainly be the game changer. Prioritizing universalised education will drive the country to become a world leader set on a sustainable growth path,” Puja added.
CRY – Child Rights and You is an Indian NGO, which works to ensure lasting change in the lives of more than 3 million underprivileged children across 19 states in India.
