Other States - Orissa   

Education system ‘crumbling’

BHUBANESWAR: Over 50,000 primary and secondary school teacher posts are lying vacant, over 2,000 college lecturer posts are to be filled up, as many as 560 private colleges are waiting to receive grant-in-aid and the number of school dropouts has reached 2.05 lakhs.

The figures clearly give an impression about the sorry state of affairs of the government-aided education system in Orissa.

As a result, whenever the Assembly sits, thousands of teachers take to the street attracting attention on their grievances.

To save crisis-ridden education system in Orissa, academicians, teacher leaders, legislators, journalists, former ministers and retired teachers on Saturday got together to evolve solutions.

“Deterioration of education system in the State is a matter of grave concern.

We need participation of all sections of society as well as political wisdom to implement the suggestions to be evolved from series of discussions,” Abani Baral of All Orissa Federation of Teachers’ Organisation (AOFTO) said.

Half of the children who enrol in Class I get dropped out by the time they reach Class 5 and most of them belong to tribal community. Shaky financial condition forces 25 lakh children to shun schools in Class 7.

Addressing the forum facilitated by the AOFTO, Prasanna Kumar Patnaik, chairman of Vision 2020 for education, said the education system was getting drowned.

Though several suggestions were put forward by vision 2020 team, the government was yet to take note of them, Mr. Patnaik said.

He maintained that it was appalling that the government devolved power of managing pre-college education to panchayats without any capacity building that triggered chaos in the sector.

When the government had already declared that its fiscal condition had improved, about 985 college teacher posts, which required about Rs. 28 crores, had been lying vacant, Rabi Ray, a teachers’ leader, said.

Former finance minister was of the view that proper management of budgetary allocation along with formulation of policy keeping ground reality in mind would help resurrect the devastated education system.

Former education minister Ramachandra Ulaka and legislator Ranendra Pratap Swain too expressed their concern over the affairs of government-aided education.

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