Arjun raps CMs for going slow on SSA scheme

HRD Minister Arjun Singh has sent a note to chief ministers whose states are lagging seriously behind in the implementation of the Sarva Shi...

HRD Minister Arjun Singh has sent a note to chief ministers whose states are lagging seriously behind in the implementation of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. And topping that list are West Bengal and Bihar. Singh has demanded speedier implementation of the school enrolment drive in the letter despatched on October 23.

Singh will raise the issue again tomorrow at a meeting of state education ministers in the Capital.

Till August 31 this year, West Bengal had set the unenviable record of having spent only 1.87 per cent of its annual allocation. Bihar surprisingly fared better than West Bengal 8212; it had spent 3.63 per cent, a figure still poor but almost the double of West Bengal.

When contacted, ministry sources explained that this percentage should be viewed in terms of the annual outlay for SSA in each of these states and not in comparison with the money released. The actual money released to Bihar and West Bengal might be less because their utilisation schedule itself is seriously far behind some of the better states like those in the South or others like Gujarat and Maharashtra.

So, in real terms, West Bengal had spent only 1.87 per cent or just about Rs 15 crore of its total annual allocation for SSA amounting to Rs 856.9 crore. Bihar had spent nearly Rs 30 crore of its total allocation for the year, which is a little more than Rs 835 crore.

Interestingly, the other backward state in school enrolment 8212; Uttar Pradesh 8212; has done miraculously well. In the first five months of the current fiscal, Mulayam Singh Yadav8217;s government spent almost 25 24.93 to be precise per cent of its total annual outlay of Rs 1,466.67 crore. It means Uttar Pradesh had spent more than Rs 350 crore by August-end this year when the administration was busy for a considerable amount of time with the general elections.

In his letter, Arjun Singh has pointed out that these states need to buck up because some of them have the most acute enrolment problem. Bihar leads the pack of backward states, with the total number of children out of school adding up to over 29.8 lakh.

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West Bengal ranks second in the list, with the number of children not attending school totalling almost 10 lakh. And even by the ministry8217;s own estimates, these figures have to be taken with a pinch of salt. These states may have a substantially higher figure of children staying away from school.

Already, the education secretaries of these states had been told to take corrective measures and speed up implementation of the SSA at a two-day workshop held in Delhi at the end of September.