Riyaz Bhat
Srinagar, Oct 26 : Owing to the ‘zero or low enrolment of students in government schools, the count of overall public schools in Jammu and Kashmir have reduced by nearly 19 percent’.
Top officials of the department informed the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO), “We had some government schools wherein the student enrolment was very low or even some with less than five. We had merged them with the nearby government schools.”
It also said that such schools were being reflected on UDISE as separate schools. “Earlier we used to have 23,117 government schools as per UDISE but in the updated database, we have only 18,820 schools.”
“We had nearly 4300 government schools wherein the student enrollment was less than five or zero,” the official said, adding that as of now there was no such government school with zero enrolment.
“In past couple of months we have been in touch with the Ministry of Education (MoE) and those schools with inadequate or zero enrolment of students has been deleted from the UDISE data,” the official said.
He said those schools which had less than five students enrolment do not exist on UDISE data and they were already merged and functional from one school complex but were being shown as separate entities on UDISE. “So we dropped them from the data.”
Pertinently, the School Education Department in the previous year had said that it had identified more than 1200 such government schools that were having low enrolment of students.
It had said that such schools would likely be merged in accordance to the catchment and feasibility of the students.
In April-2022, School Education Department had said that it was all set to merge 720 government-run-schools of Jammu and Kashmir having an inadequate student enrolment—(KNO)
