Friday, April 5, 2013

In most schools, seats are still empty


Delhi education minister and minister for women and child welfare, Kiran Walia, explains the action her ministry has taken against schools flouting the RTE and the admission guidelines.     What are the challenges you have faced with the EWS admissions?
One of the biggest problems is getting enough applications for all seats and filling up the vacancies. There aren’t enough applications in a number of schools. According to our experience, most applications are given in for a hundred schools. In the rest of the schools the seats are going empty. Another problem is the distance criteria. In this case, we can ask the school to remove the distance criterion but then the issue of transportation comes in. These are some complex issues.
Is the Delhi government planning to streamline the admission in other classes as well?
No, we are not planning any such step at the time but if we get complaints about schools screening children or parents or taking a capitation fee, we take immediate action against the school. There are very stringent laws in this regard. However, we get very few complaints as many parents do not want to come out in the open.
The dropout rate from private schools is considered to be high.
This is an area that has so far not been taken into account. We plan to ask schools to send us statistics on the number of students admitted and the number of students retained. This is data worth collecting.

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