Updated on: Thursday, March 22, 2012
The Government today said that it has identified 126 districts in the country where schools have recorded less than 60% retention rate in 2011-12 academic season. Minister of Sate for Human Resource Development D Purandeswari said in a written reply to Lok Sabha, "The Department of School Education and Literacy has identified 126 districts with retention rate below 60 per cent (in schools) for the year 2011-12 under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan(SSA)."
The Minister said, Such districts, also known as Special Focus Districts, are identified on the basis of massive classroom gap, number of school drop-outs, huge gender gap and low retention rate. She further said that Districts with more than 25 per cent Schedule Caste and Schedule Tribe population or those affected by Left Wing extremism and border area districts are also treated as Special Focus Districts.
The Minister while replying to another question said, that, out of the total 13,622,86 schools, only 158866 are English medium institutions compared to 7,19,387 where Hindi is the medium of education. There are 4,84,033 other language schools in the country.
She also informed that the government has launched a scheme to set up 6,000 model schools, with objective to have at least one good quality senior secondary school in every block of the country. "Of them, 3,500 schools are to be set up in educationally backward blocks in Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) template through state/UT governments," Purandeswari added.