Delhi: Increase in applicants to govt schools, say officials

Non-plan admission is ongoing but officials state that 2.36 lakh applications have been received. “So far, 1,58,484 students have been admitted in Delhi government schools. The rest are being considered. After new admissions, total enrolment has reached 17.6 lakh for 2021-2022. It was 16.28 lakh for 2020-2021, and 15.05 lakh for 2019-2020. We do not have precise comparable data on non-plan admissions for previous years, the process was more decentralised and at school level but has become streamlined as it is online during the pandemic,” a senior official stated.

The number of applications in question here would largely represent students who had previously been studying in private schools, but also includes students applying to government schools at the nursery and KG level and are, therefore, first time school-goers.

However, individual schools, particularly popular ones, have seen a surge in transfers from private schools. Government Co-Ed Senior Secondary School, Rohini Sector 8, has seen 397 new admissions of students this year who were previously studying in private schools.

“In normal years, we had 100-150 of such admissions but it’s considerably more this year. Most importantly in this is that we have a nice new building which is attracting more parents and we have been producing good results. There are economic considerations for parents as well because of the pandemic. Our student strength has now increased from around 2,400 to 2,900. I am hoping that teacher post fixations can be done as soon as possible so that the number of teachers also grow with the number of students so teaching-learning can happen well,” said principal Awadhesh Jha.

“In our cluster, there are four schools — two evening shift and two morning shift. In this cluster, we had 2,099 non-plan admission applications for classes VI to IX in the first phase, and 1,028 in the second phase. Because ours is a morning shift school, most of these stated a preference for our school but we could accommodate only around 200. The rest have been allotted schools which had the capacity to accommodate them,” said head of Government Co-ed Sarvodaya Vidyalaya, Rohini Sector 21.