MP edu dept plans campaign to boost enrolment under RTE

After failing to elicit a favourable response from parents regarding admissions under the RTE Act last year, the Madhya Pradesh’s school education department is going to launch an aggressive campaign for the academic year 2016-17.

The implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, which guarantees that every child has a right to full time elementary education, has largely been poor not only in Indore district but also across the state since it came into force in 2010. The Act mandates a minimum of 25% free seats for children belonging to weaker sections in all private unaided primary schools.

In 2015, the education department managed to fill only 4,912 seats out of 21,105 seats available under the RTE quota in Indore district after three rounds of admission. Officials attribute the situation to the lack of awareness about the law in rural areas, besides parents’ preference for CBSE schools over the state board-affiliated institutions.

School edu dept likely to issue notification for admissions under RTE in second week of Feb

This year, however, the department is aiming to change the trend. The district project coordinator of RTE Act, Shashikant Gubrele, told HT that the school education department is likely to issue a notification for admissions under the Act to private schools in the second week of February.

Gubrele said almost every district in the state has witnessed poor response on RTE and it’s not limited to Indore.

“Every year, except for a few prominent CBSE schools in the district, most seats at private and semi-private schools affiliated to the Madhya Pradesh Board of Secondary Education as well as CBSE remain vacant,” the official said.

“But we are trying our best to turn this situation around. This year, we are going for aggressive campaigning off-line as well online to make parents aware about the same and to bring them to schools,” he added.

The department, the official said, will ask all principals/ nodal officers, block resource coordinators to ensure that all the information related to filled and vacant seats in schools is available on notice board, so that parents know the seat status easily. “When it’s online, we will put the vacancy status on education portal for net users.”

Gubrele said the awareness level among parents would increase with time.