In 5 yrs, AMC opens 60 primary schools, merges 140

The reasons cited for the decision initiated five years ago by authorities are low enrolment and high running costs in sustaining such schools. At present, nearly 459 municipal schools across the city have around 1.68 lakh enrolment.

“Along with fewer students, there were other reasons such as two different schools — upper primary and lower primary — running parallel in the same building or in close vicinity. Such schools have been merged,” said AMC school board administrative officer LD Desai.

Justifying the decision, he said that the schools were merged after a survey revealed low enrolment in these schools.

“These have been merged with nearest schools taking into consideration all factors so that no student and staff has to suffer. Also, with the merging of schools, running these schools is easier now,” he added.

While the schools merged are majorly Gujarati medium, among the new municipal schools opened in the past five years, priority is given to English medium ones. For instance, this academic session, 18 new municipal schools were opened, all English medium. In 2021-’20, among 10 new schools, five were English medium four Hindi and one Gujarati medium.

Similar was the case with previous years when among around 10-12 new municipal schools, majority were English medium, which the authorities stated is based on a “demand survey”.

The state government has been implementing government school mergers more aggressively over the past two years when around 500 were merged across the state. As per the state government plans, the merger of classes will continue in the coming academic session, too.

This has been implemented following the Mission Schools of Excellence scheme launched in 2020 for six years, funded by the World Bank and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), to upgrade 50 per cent of total government primary and secondary schools across the state and bring down “non-viable” schools.

Among 497 government primary schools merged across the state, nine schools had zero enrolment. Over 130 schools had an enrolment between one to 10 students while another 107 schools with 11 to 20 students.

The state data also reveals that among 86 government primary schools closed down over the past two years, 28 schools did not have a single student. Another 36 schools had enrolment figures of less than 10 students.

In both closing down and merger, over 1,300 government teachers were affected and thus accommodated in nearby schools.

As per the Socio Economic Review 2022, in the year 2020-’21, there were a total of 33,348 government primary schools in Gujarat against 33,729 schools in 2018-’19.