Indian Express 03.12.2009 AMC school board budget graph climbs, number of students declines
Officials say migration, improved financial condition are main factors behind increased dropout rates
Year after year, the budget for the Municipal School Board as also the expenditure on each student has seen an increase. But the number of students and teachers in the schools has seen a decline, despite the extravagant enrolment drives.
In 2003-04, the school board budget was Rs 113.02 crore and the number of students and teachers were 1,94,194 and 4,882. The subsequent year, the number of students dropped to 1,89,045, and the spending per student was Rs 5,832, which jumped to Rs 10,237 in 2007-08 when the number of students further fell to 1,62, 886. In 2008-09, the number of students has decreased further to 1.58 lakh but the budget has skyrocketed to Rs 286.81 crore even as the spending per students has declined to Rs 9,684. This year, in the first six months, the numbers have further fallen to 1.53 lakh with spending per student coming down to Rs 6,690.
The budget for 2009-10 has risen to Rs 377 crore, an increase of Rs 90 crore from the previous year’s budget. But the number of students has gone down to 1.52 lakh.
School board chairman Manubhai Raval and administrative officer L D Desai said factors like people moving to other cities and poor parents shifting their wards from municipal schools to private schools with improvement in economic conditions have aided the quantitative decline.
“Sending children to private schools has become a status symbol, and people shift their children to such schools at the first opportunity,” said Raval. They added that the five per cent dropout rate has also contributed to this situation, notwithstanding the fact that around 2,100 students shifted from private schools to municipal schools in the current year.
Asked as to why there was no improvement in the education quality despite recruiting teachers on merit and paying them the best in the field, Raval said there may be five to 10 per cent “unscrupulous people in the teaching fraternity, but we are trying hard to plug the loopholes”. “We will introduce internal evaluation system for teachers,” he said.
