Out-of-school children: SSA figure exceeds Maharashtra data

Activist Ghanshyam Sonar from Campaign Against Commercialisation of Education (CACE) said the initiative of surveying out-of school students in July did not serve any purpose as the number of such children in the state reported in 2007 was over 17 lakh. “The state government has been claiming that the state has only 81,000 out-of-school children in the age group of 6-14 years. According to the 2007 SSA report, Maharashtra had one of the highest numbers of out-of-school children. Hence, the state government decided to do a count,” he said. Sonar added that while at least 25 per cent of the 17 lakh out-of-school children had never been to a school, the remaining 75 per cent attended school at some point of time or the other but left due to distance, language barriers or other reasons.

Last week, Education Minister Vinod Tawde revealed statistics of the number of schools with 0-20 students in the state during the Question Hour in Vidhan Sabha. He said there were 12,646 schools in all and these schools had 24,692 teachers. The disclosure by Tawde, according to education experts, was intended to highlight the fact that the student-teacher ratio was way below the accepted norm of 30:1 and that teachers were surplus.

Following this, J M Abhyankar, former chairman of the Maharashtra State Board and president of the Shiv Sena’s Shikshak Sena, criticised the state government for not putting in enough efforts to trace and enrol the out-of-school students.

As per the SSA report, there are in all 1,45,326 out-of-school children in the age group of 6-14 years, of which 71,541 have never been enrolled in any school. Of the remaining, around 42,270 are dropouts and 31,515 were enrolled but never attended school. Apart from this, there are around 22,551 disabled children who are out of school and were never enrolled in any school due to lack of special schools.