The Hindu : New Delhi News : Enrolment drive to focus on dropouts

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jul 08, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Enrolment drive to focus on dropouts

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI, JULY 7. To enhance awareness about education and bridge social, regional and gender gaps, the Delhi Government has decided to launch a "Dakhila Abhiyan'' (Enrolment Drive) in the Capital.

The drive will be undertaken in all Government and Municipal Corporation of Delhi-run schools as well as the learning centres being run by non-government organisations. It will target children between six and14 years of age for free and compulsory education.

According to the Delhi Education Minister, Arvinder Singh Lovely, all efforts would be made to make the drive successful, and for this help from various sections of society and voluntary organisations would be taken. School dropouts, especially the girl children, will be the focus of the programme that proposes to bring them back to school. The move is part of the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan whose purpose is to provide useful and relevant elementary education for all children in the 6 to14 age group by 2010. Another goal of this programme is to bridge the social, regional and gender gap with the active participation of the community in the management of schools.

Mr. Lovely said to cover all the dropouts and children who were not able to make it to schools, the Government had allowed NGOs to run learning centres for such children. Under this new initiative, the government would also launch a publicity blitz in Hindi and Urdu soon to spread the message. In addition to this, mobile vans equipped with video recorders would move around in various localities particularly slum clusters and resettlement colonies to spread awareness about the programme and importance of educating children. He said banners carrying messages for enrolling children would be put up in various Government schools. Street plays would be staged in all the districts of Delhi to encourage parents to send their children to schools and learning centres run by the NGOs.

The Education Minister said the effort was to ensure that all children complete five years of primary schooling by 2007. The focus would be on elementary education of satisfactory quality with emphasis on education for life, bridge all gender and social category gaps at primary stage by 2007 and at elementary education level by 2010 and also ensure universal retention by that deadline.

Many projects and programmes at the micro and macro levels had been undertaken in the past in this direction. Experiences had shown that with all the past interventions, there had been considerable progress in providing access to primary education, increase in enrolment and retention, improvement in school attendance and generation of strong demand for education especially for girls.

However, pupil achievement had been low and there had been inter-State and inter-district differences in pupils' attendance and achievement level. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is an attempt to provide human capabilities to al1 children through provision of community owned quality education in a mission mode. The SSA is a response to the demand for quality basic education all over the country. It is an opportunity for promoting social justice through basic education.

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