New Delhi: With almost 50 per cent of Class X students dropping out in Odisha, the state recorded the highest dropout rate for 10th standard in the country as per data for the 2021-22 academic year shared by the Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in Lok Sabha Monday. For 2021-22, while the dropout rate for Class X nationally stood at 20.6 per cent, Odisha performed the worst among states with a dropout rate of 49.9 per cent, followed by Bihar, which had a dropout rate of 42.1 per cent, informed Pradhan in a written reply. The minister was responding to a question by DMK MP Kalanidhi Veeraswamy on whether the government is cognizant of the analysis based on the recent exercise carried out by the Ministry of Education that about 3.5 million students stopped their education in Class 10. Pradhan informed that 1,89,90,809 students appeared for the Class X examination in 2022, of which 29,56,138 students failed to progress further.
In a positive development for Odisha, number of students failing in Class X board exams has fallen from 1,38,462 in 2019 to only 8,944 in 2022. “The reasons for the failure of students in examination depends on various factors namely, not attending the schools, difficulty in following the instruction in schools, lack of interest in the studies, level of difficulty of question paper, lack of quality teachers, lack of support from parents, teachers, and schools,” said the minister. “Further, education is in the concurrent list of the Constitution and the majority of the schools are under the domain of respective State and UT Governments,” he added. The ministry also shared details of students’ dropout rate at Class X for the last four years (2018-19 to 2021-22) state-wise.
Apart from Odisha and Bihar, the other states with high dropouts are Meghalaya (33.5 per cent), Karnataka (28.5 per cent), Andhra Pradesh and Assam with 28.3 per cent each, Gujarat (28.2 per cent) and Telangana (27.4 per cent). The states with dropout rate less than 10 per cent are Uttar Pradesh (9.2 per cent), Tripura (3.8 per cent), Tamil Nadu (9 per cent), no dropout in Manipur, Madhya Pradesh (9.8 per cent), Himachal Pradesh (2.5 per cent), Haryana (7.4 per cent) and Delhi (1.3 per cent).