School Education in Jammu and Kashmir valley is in the doldrum notwithstanding incidents of violence kicked up by militants. Though militants have wooed many students and with all that Education is in the lacklustre stage. Despite the authorities' claims, Niti Aayog's School Education Quality Index (SEQI) presents a dismal picture of education in Jammu and Kashmir, with low enrolment figures and 45 per cent schools without any head. The state has been ranked 16 of 20 large states with Kerala, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Assam the best-performing.
The report says J&K has been found lacking on several parameters, such as learning outcome domain and infrastructure. In 'access outcome domain', it has only improved from 20 to 24 per cent in the last two years. Infrastructure and facilities have improved by 5 per cent, but the overall performance remains far from satisfactory at 34 per cent. Though facilities have improved by five per cent yet the overall parametres of studies have suffered a lot. Militancy is responsible for the slum in the educational facilities. On one side students get busy with encounters between militants and the security forces and later resort to stone pelting on their security forces. This results in police fire and retaliate with stone pelting thereby injuring scores of students. This way neither the students nor the teachers have any interest in studies. That too in schools.
"A child in the 6-14 age bracket will be considered out of school if she/he has never been enrolled in an elementary school or if after enrolment has been absent from school without prior intimation for a period of 45 days or more". The report says in J&K only 1.8 per cent schoolchildren were enrolled in mainstream schools up to 2019. The percentage of "identified out-of-school" children was 1.9 per cent in the 2015 academic year, which decreased to 1.8 per cent in 2016. The percentage of schools with computer-aided learning facilities at the elementary level, developed and operationalised under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, is a mere 3.9%. The percentage of secondary schools with computer labs has fallen from 48% to 38%. |
