School Education Department has claimed that in the past five years the dropout rate among the students have decreased by more than 32 percent in comparison to the years prior to 2019.
It said that till the academic year 2023-24, the dropout rate among at high school level has decreased by 32.25 percent.
According to the official figures accessed by the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO), prior to 2019 there was a dropout rate of 18.48 percent among the students of high school level.
However, it also reveals that in the past five years that dropout rate has reduced to only 5.96 percent at high school level.
The official documents also reveal that under the ‘AAO SCHOOL CHALEIN’ campaign launched in 2020-21, at least 70.000 students were enrolled in 2020-21.
“But in 2022-23, there was a hike of 17.7 percent and 1,65,000 students were enrolled,” it reads.
It also said that in 2023-24, under the same banner, over 1.50 lakh students were enrolled in government schools.
It is pertinent to mention that in the ongoing academic year, the count of overall public schools in Jammu Kashmir have reduced by nearly 19 percent owing to the ‘zero or low enrollment of students in government schools’.
The officials of the department had said, “Earlier we used to have 23,117 government schools as per UDISE but in the updated database, we have only 18,820 schools.”
The official had further informed that “There were some government schools wherein the student enrollment was very low or even some with less than five. We had merged them with the nearby government schools.”—(KNO)