Bhubaneswar: The children cannot come to school but schools can go home. The state-based CSOs working on education have urged the Odisha government to clarify mechanisms and modus-operandi of recently announced ‘Shiksha Samparka’ scheme and to initiate remedial classes to bridge the learning gap among children.
As per the government report, there are only 2.2 million school children out of around 6 million, who could get the benefit from the state government’s online classes such as ‘Shiksha Sanjog’, due to the lack of required digital resources, poor teledensity and lack of available internet infrastructure in rural Odisha.
At present, the CSOs are running remedial classes at 359 centres in 15 operational districts where there is a large chunk of the tribal and Dalit population. Mostly, they run remedial classes in clubhouses, community-centres nearby their habitations with a maximum of five to six children. Subsequently, they have engaged around 300 local youths along with their 87 community members who take a two-hour class.
“The Sikkim Government’s homeschooling model is something which Odisha government can think of replicating it. Under their homeschooling model, teachers will visit students’ houses with all resources to teach them. Also, the education department of Sikkim has meticulously mapped out the location of every government school teacher and has assigned them areas,” said a CSO member.
“A teacher living in a village may be employed in another village or district. But now they are asking their counterpart in that village to take over their students and vice versa. Why the Odisha government cannot adopt a similar sort of that practice?” asks Anjan Pradhan, of Odisha Shramajeebee Mancha.
The pupil-teacher ratio is also something that remains a bone of contention in Odisha. In February 2020, Odisha School and Mass Education minister Samir Ranjan Dash informed the Odisha Assembly that of the 46,332 primary and upper primary schools, 18,589 do not have headmasters. In 8,076 high schools, there is a vacancy of 11,588 assistant teachers. Therefore, engaging local educated youths as volunteers will be a viable option to fill the existing pupil-teachers ratio gap.
The National Achievement Survey(NAS) conducted by the NCERT in 2018 found that only 53 pc of students in Odisha were able to answer questions on the basic competencies correctly. Similarly, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) (Rural), 2018 revealed that only 33.1 pc students of Class V could recognise numbers between 10 and 99 while just 24.5 pc could do subtraction. “The startling statistics call for doorstep remedial classes for the low performing students so that they can catch up with their peers when they return to school after reopening and there can be no better opportunity than this lockdown to start the remedial classes”, said Ruchi Kashyap, of Atmashakti Trust.
