Karnataka - Gulbarga   

Education sector makes good progress

GULBARGA: Significant progress has been made in achieving the targets fixed for the 10th Plan in the education sector, and the net enrolment ratio at the end of the 10th Plan period was 98.02.

Official sources told The Hindu here on Friday that one of the important targets of the 10th Plan was to improve access to primary and higher primary schools within a radius of 1 km and 3 km respectively. At the end of the plan period, the access ratio to primary schools was 99.13 and to higher primary schools was 99.61.

The State has been able to bring down the dropout rate from the 1st to 5th standards to 8.87 per cent and from 1st to 7th standards to 14.25 per cent.

The student-teacher ratio at the end of the 10th Plan period was 28:1.

The Government has decided to restrict opening schools and colleges in backward blocks identified by the High Power Committee for Redressal of Regional Imbalance and bring down the dropout rate to less than 5 per cent in the lower primary stage and less than 10 per cent in the higher primary stage.

More stress will laid be on vocational education at the plus 2 level, and the Government proposes to bring different departments that give vocational education under the Labour Department to ensure uniformity in the standard of teaching.

Areas of concern for the Government are enrolment and out-of-school children, which need to be addressed effectively. The enrolment of students in standards one to five decreased by 6.62 per cent during 2007-08 compared to the previous year. Sources said the census conducted in 2007 revealed a disturbing number of out-of-school children in the State.

The State, which had brought down the number of out-of-school children from 4.02 lakh in 2002 to 75,000 in 2006, has witnessed a reversal with the number going up to 93,276 in 2007-08, with 30,000 of them being students from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Retention rate at the elementary level was 90.15 per cent in the State.

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