Neetaben N Bhadresha (44), a head teacher at a municipal school in Ahmedabad’s Vasna, spent her summer vacation going from home to home and tracking down 57 children who dropped out of her school in the past year. This meant making repeated visits on her scooter, convincing parents to not view their children as “earning members” and pull them out of schools.
It pained her to see former students helping their parents sell vegetables on the streets near the Jivraj Mehta Hospital in the evenings.
These 57 children dropped out from Classes 1-8 from her school during the 2025-26 academic session. At the end of the ‘Back to School’ campaign launched by the State Education Department in May-June this year, all the children returned to school.
“Apart from selling vegetables, children would go to the wholesale market with their parents in the morning to buy them. So, they would miss both the morning as well as the evening classes,” Bhadresha tells The Indian Express.
“While children were ready to attend school, it was the parents who were insisting that they help them in their work,” said Bhadresha, who heads the Vasna Municipal Primary School number 3. A veteran, she had spent 12 years at a municipal school in Kankaria before she joined here 18 months ago. The school runs a morning shift for Classes 1-5 and evening for Classes 6-8.
The government had identified over 6.41 lakh students who had dropped out in the past academic year, across 44,000 government and grant-in-aid schools in Gujarat, and launched a campaign to re-enroll them. In Ahmedabad, following the teachers’ dogged tracking of school dropouts, 9,036 from 10,387 enrolled back – recording an 86 per cent success rate for the drive. The number includes 1,357 former students who had enrolled in schools in other states or in Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and thus continued their education.
Every teacher faced a different obstacle. In the case of Suketubhai Yagnik, teacher at Jahangirpura Primary School in Asarwa area, over 80 per cent of his 37 students were girls who dropped out. When he visited homes of the six girl students who had dropped out of Class 8, their parents told him they needed the elder daughter to take care of younger siblings or do chores around the house.
“Parents are of the opinion that after a certain age, girls should not go out and study. Instead, they train them in household work such as stocking water, cutting vegetables, cooking, cleaning and washing. They even teach a 6-7 year old girl all these tasks,” Yagnik told this paper, adding, “When everything else would fail, at that point we would make parents aware about various government schemes, especially for girls. Yet parents cited social constraints and would refuse to send them back.”
Asarwa locality, where this school is, largely comprises migrants who have made Ahmedabad their home. Known for textile mills decades ago, now it is better known for the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital – the largest public hospital in Gujarat.
Municipal teachers in this neighbourhood were asked to cover a 30-35 km radius, given that most parents would move frequently to find work.
For Yagnik and other teachers, the task grew difficult as the families were vegetable vendors or daily wagers living in rented quarters or temporary structures. “We would find them the first time, but they would be gone in the second.
The contact number and addresses submitted during the admission process became irrelevant. Every three-four months, they would keep changing their numbers as most of the time they do not recharge their mobile numbers,” says Yagnik.
Migration – A major setback
Sitaben Patel, a veteran teacher at Chanakya Gujarati Primary school in the Chanakyapuri area, which has a high migrant density mostly with menial jobs would have to track her students from one location to another. “One of the families of a Class II girl staying along the railway track changed multiple locations…perhaps they were being evicted. But we were able to convince them to re-admit and assured them that wherever they will were we will bring their daughter to the school.”
Sanjay Raval, principal of the Chanakyapuri school, says “Migration is a big issue among parents in our school. A majority of them are from Rajasthan and a few from different districts of Gujarat. Around 80 per cent of them are into footwear-making work, while those from Gujarat are mainly safai kamdars.”
The Chanakyapuri Gujarati Primary School is one of the seven schools in Ahmedabad city that also has a secondary school launched last year.
Of 54 students re-enrolled under Raval, seven who had dropped out after Class VIII were readmitted in Class XI.
In cases where migrants from states like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi returned, teachers would take the trouble to check if they were enrolled in schools in their home states, says Pareshbhai Patel a teacher at Indrapuri Public School in Ramol area of the city, who had 44 dropouts to track.
Patel identified 16 students who had dropped out in Class 9 in 2024-25 of which 11 were girls. He along with a few teachers available during the summer vacation visited slums of Khandwadi, Dantanivas and Hanumannagar in Ramol and CTM areas and got all 44 re-enrolled.
Ahmedabad Municipal School Board Administrative Officer L D Desai said, “Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel felicitated our teachers on July 22 for achieving a high success rate in bringing back the dropped out students”. The re-enrolling of students was under the Samras Vidya Setu campaign, under which one of the teachers felicitated was Sanjay Raval.
What exercise found
Students who refused to re-enroll 266
Students could not be tracked at all 853
Duplicate enrolments, deaths etc 243
The government had identified over 6.41 lakh students who had dropped out in the past academic year, across 44,000 government and grant-in-aid schools in Gujarat, and launched a campaign to re-enroll them. (Photo Express) 
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