Meghalaya
New education initiatives
The Meghalaya state government is contemplating a voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) for 15,000 ‘untrained’ teachers in the state, most of them without even minimum qualifications, the state’s governor R.S. Mooshahary said in Shillong on March 10.
“Bearing in mind the huge backlog of 15,000 untrained teachers and limited capacity in government teacher training colleges, the government is contem-plating outsourcing the task of training teachers,” the governor said in his address to the state assembly on the opening day of the budget session. Mooshahary, however, added that teachers who cannot be trained due to lack of minimum qualifications are proposed to be given the VRS option. “Discussions with the Asian Develop-ment Bank for funding the scheme are underway,” he said.
The governor also announced that the state government has received sanction from the Centre to provide internet connectivity to 241 schools. Teaching under the EDUSAT programme is also being intensified in collaboration with ISRO, the governor said, adding that an educational portal has been launched to allow public scrutiny of the education department’s activities.
Rajasthan
Gehlot’s gifts to education
Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot announced a Rs.200 crore education package on March 9 for special backward classes (SBC) in the state. The package includes a pre-matric scholarship scheme for SBC students of classes VI-X; free tuition; financial aid for girls in higher education, and six VI-XII residential schools. A girl’s college in Bayana and mobile hospitals in selected tehsils of Daang district are also proposed to be built.
Moreover to encourage differently-abled meritorious students, the chief minister proposed to provide Rs.50,000 to each student admitted into higher education institutes such as IITs, IIMs and AIIMS; a sum of Rs.1 lakh and Rs.50,000 to students selected for the Union public services and state civil services. In addition the chief minister announced the state government’s intent to upgrade 200 madrasas to the status of secondary schools.
In an unprecedented initiative to radically overhaul education in Rajas-than, 25,406 posts for various teaching positions in secondary and senior secondary schools and land grants for promoting engineering colleges in Barmer, Baran, Churu, Karauli, Dholpur and Jaisalmer districts, were also announced. A special grant for a Centre for Converging Technologies to promote high-level research in nano-technology was also proposed by the chief minister.
Orissa
Additional exams stress
Students in some tribal areas of Sundargarh district, Orissa, are forced to travel 30-50 km to write their Plus Two school leaving examinations, in violation of the norms of the education depart-ment, according to a March 12 PTI report filed from Rourkela. “Strong resentment prevails among students and parents due to bad communication in interior areas and lack of any proper accommo-dation facilities in the villages,” says the report.
Although the state government’s education department has decreed that all examination centres will be sited within 5 km of schools, in the tribal-intensive Koida block, students of the Barsua high school were obliged to travel to the Lahunipada exam centre covering a distance of 40 km, according to education officials in interior Orissa.
Andhra Pradesh
Flight from vernacular schools
In response to public demand, English will be taught in government primary schools from class I from the start of the new academic year in June-July, Andhra Pradesh’s minister for primary education Sake Sailajanath informed media personnel in Hyderabad on March 26. “The idea is to provide English education to children from poorer sections as well as rural areas right from class I rather than class III as per current policy, so that they can compete with students of private schools,” said Sailajanath.
According to education ministry officials, a report of the Regional Institute of English (RIE), Bangalore has established that enrolment in govern-ment primaries and upper primaries in Andhra Pradesh has fallen drastically from 84.48 percent to 55.72 percent even as admissions in private schools increased from 17.52 percent to 44.28 percent in the period 1995-96 to 2009-10.
In particular, the RIE data indicates that enrolments in class I-X Telugu-medium government schools declined from 83.47 percent to 65.54 percent, while increasing from 13.77 percent to 31.66 percent in English medium schools. “It is observed that most parents in rural areas are withdrawing their children from government Telugu-medium schools due to lack of English teaching,” notes the RIE report.
Goa
English medium demand
Parents of school-going children in the western seaboard state of Goa are demanding inclusion of English as the medium of instruction under the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act). Banding under the Forum for Rights of Children’s Educa-tion (FRCE), they convened a massive rally at Panaji to unite a cross-section of people over the issue. “The parent-teacher associations of schools across Goa have collected 51,372 signa-tures in a single day,” FRCE spokesman Savio Lopes informed the media on March 27.
Responding, the state’s education minister, Atanasio Monserrate, informed the legislative assembly that a “policy decision on the issue will be adopted soon”.
FRCE has demanded that English should be allowed as the medium of instruction even in elementary education, but that Marathi and Konkani should also be taught as compulsory subjects. “Although the RTE Act states that medium of instruction at the elementary stage should be the mother tongue, it also adds ‘as far as practi-cable’. FRCE believes that to maintain continuity in education up to university level it is practical to have English as a medium of instruction as the academic performance of students will improve, drop-outs will decrease and enrolment in higher education will increase. All this is in the public interest,” says Lopes.
Swati Roy with bureau inputs