Shuttling teachers are a hurdle to RTE

KARIMNAGAR: Education officials and teachers struggling to meet their enrolment targets to fulfil RTE objectives in the districts are finding it an uphill task.  All the same, education officials in Karimnagar district claim to have fulfilled 95 of the target.Some 2,71,000 students in the 6-11 age group and 1,91,565 in the 11-14 age group have been enrolled in institutions such as regular schools, Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas, residential special training centres and others in the last academic year. Impressive as those figures are, some 2,312 children dropped out of the programme.For the coming academic year, the government has launched rapid action surveys with the help of mandal resource persons (MRPs) to identify children for enrollment. As of May 31, about 2,675 children were found to be out of school in the 6-14 age group, said Rajiv Vidya Mission project officer V Ganga Reddy. However, the mid-day meals, free school uniforms and improved school infrastructure should address this problem effectively, he said.The fact that many teachers do not live in the area where they teach is handicapping the RTE effort in the districts. They thus cannot keep tabs on the dropout rate and cannot effectively persuade parents to keep their children in school. About 80 percent of the teachers in Karimnagar district shuttle to rural schools from their homes in the mandal and district headquarters.Poor infrastructure also impairs the RTE vision. About 400 schools in this district have no power or drinking water. About 1,000 have no toilets, which discourages children, especially girls, from staying in school.All the same, Karimangar district has relative fewer out-of-school children in the state, according to an annual status of education report brought out by Pratham, an NGO active in the area of education in slum localities.