School merger project leads to increasing dropouts in Odisha

Cuttack: Children in Odisha's remoter villages reportedly drop out after schools with low enrollment merged, according to a report in Indian Express.

Merger of two primary school often mean students are asked to study in one of them. The other school soon goes desolate with no school activity, overrun by weeds and thicket. Now small kids have to walk long distance to continue education.

Taking kids to school for most parents mean risk losing work on farms. For many other children, the situation is different with their fathers working mostly in Kerala to the Southern India; no doubt they could ever imagine to stay back home taking kids to school. With fathers away, mothers work on farms in the village.

The report takes us to the situation of primary school in Rayagada district, which is one of more than 4,800 shut down by November 2020, .

The merger followed the 2017 NITI Aayog project to "rationalise" schools with low enrollment.

"Now, none of its 14 students have resumed physical classes. After the merger, the students were enrolled in Balipadra primary school; getting there requires travelling 3 km across either a farm or an unpaved road, both of which flood during the monsoon," the report said.

You might well think the distance of three kilometres is not a big thing; most parents worry sending their wards alone or in groups across villages through unpaved roads and lanes, which is all the more difficult during monsoon, according to the report.

"The genesis of Odisha's school merger — the 2017 NITI Aayog programme — is called Sustainable Action for Transforming Human Capital in Education (SATH-E). Odisha was among three states, along with Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, selected by NITI Aayog for the project to implement education reform, which included, among other things, school rationalisation. Under it, schools with low enrollment were closed and their students were shifted to the nearest ones," the report said.

Most parents including Nidra Twika worry about the safety of their girls, who however walk in groups to school. Nidra Twika's husband is working in Kerala and her six-year-old daughter was in class 1 last year. She had to stay back home to take care of daughter and two-year-old son.

Alongside on-going school merger, Odisha's The School and Mass Education (SME) Department closed 4,841 to date under the SATHE Project which had planned to shut down 14,000 schools.

"The process was expected to be completed in December 2020 — the SME department issued a circular asking district collectors and education officers to expedite the merger in March 2020 — but stalled by November that year owing to the pandemic and the lockdown", report said.