‘Mushrooming of govt schools without infrastructure derails edu system’
DIET conducts survey
Decisions on mushrooming of government schools with no accountability in presence of private schools in the vicinity is one of the main reasons of people preferring private schools to government schools, say officials of the District Institute of Education and Trainings (DIET) which has conducted an extensive survey across the eight education zones in Srinagar.
The DIET has sent out its teams across these educational zones to interview teachers and parents through questionnaires, compiling a survey report after working for a week’s time.“Mushrooming of primary and middle government schools without any infrastructure and then permitting establishment of private schools to owners mostly bureaucrats is the main cause behind this mess,” said one of the officials of the DIET who was part of the survey team.
“The cluster of government schools has been created just for jobs..mostly wives of bureaucrats are placed in them….while on the other side without any thought private schools also belonging to bureaucrats and people with power are in the same vicinity obviously attracting people with options of better infrastructure,” said the official. “This has to do with vote bank politics also.”
The team had two questionnaires – one with 24 questions for teachers and one for parents with 18 questions.
Most of the parents replied that government schools had no infrastructure and no one held the teachers accountable as reason of which they could not trust admitting children there. “Even though meals have been given in schools to attract roll, parents have preferred to pay fees in nearby private schools than sending children to government schools.”
The data collected from the survey has been submitted to the State Institute of Education for further action.
“The government has on one hand created primary and middle schools like vendor shops and given recognition to private schools just like that….. the survey has been conducted so that necessary action be taken with more effective research done.”
Minister for Education, Nayeem Akhtar has directed the Education Department to focus on rationalization. The department had filed report on the schools with “zero roll” or “less roll” after which many of them had been closed. However, the condition of the government schools remains to be in doldrums.
