Two years after deciding to shut down schools operating with less than 20 students, 13,817 such schools are functioning with uninterrupted government grants. Even though the schools were issued notices pertaining to the government decision, there has been no action yet. Citing that these schools were an unnecessary burden on the state government, the direction for closure of these schools was ordered in 2014. The state government is facing problems running government schemes, including mid-day meal scheme, and maintaining pupil-teacher ratio among other things due to low headcount, besides problems in disbursal of grants. The decision followed a dialogue with these schools and education officers. The 13,817 schools include Marathi, English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Sindhi, Tamil, and Telugu medium schools. Watch What Else Is making News Notices to this effect have already been sent to education officers. While officials in the state’s Directorate of Primary Education say that preparations are underway to derecognise these schools, Principal Secretary, Department of School Education and Sports clarified that no concrete step has been taken towards closure of these schools. “We are yet to take any decision on this matter. We have to chalk out a proper plan before closing down these schools,” said Nand Kumar, Principal Secretary, Department of School Education and Sports. Of these, there are 3,700 schools running primary, upper primary and secondary classes with less than 10 students. There are close to 13,104 schools being run either by the state government or local self government, 104 schools are private aided, and 418 are private unaided schools. Pune and Konkan divisions have the highest number of schools with less than 20 students. While Pune has 1031 such schools, Raigarh and Ratnagiri have 1310 and 1265 such schools respectively. This is followed by Satara, Sidhudurg and Gadchiroli with 863, 787 and 742 such schools. Mumbai has 55 schools which has less than 20 students. Closure of schools located in tribal and rural areas will impact children in these areas. However, these schools are unable to impart quality education. Hence the option of merging these schools with bigger schools is being worked out. The latest initiative is a circular dated February 21 to education officials of all the districts by the state education commissioner Purushottam Bhapkar. Bhapkar issued the circular asking officials to identify possibilities of a merger of such schools with the nearby bigger schools and how much this move will cost the government. State Director of Primary Education, Govind Nandede could not be reached for comment.
