Riyaz Bhat
Srinagar, Apr 23: In Jammu and Kashmir, ‘hundreds of government-run-schools are with zero student enrolments. Besides, the majority of the institutions are having less than 50 student enrolments.
Moreover, the official documents and latest figures accessed state that more than 18 percent of government schools at elementary level here have an adverse Pupil Teacher Ratio (PTR).
The officials from Jammu and Kashmir in 2023 had said that the count of overall public schools had reduced by nearly 19 percent owing to the ‘zero or low enrolment of students in government schools’.
However, the Ministry of Education (MoE) in the latest figures regarding the school size and single teacher schools in Jammu and Kashmir has said that, “Out of the total 23,173 schools in the UT, there are 848 schools with zero enrolment.”
It also said, “16,179 schools are with less than 50 enrolments. Further, there are 2413 single teacher schools in the UT.”
“In addition, the number of schools with adverse PTR at the elementary level is 18.43 percent,” it reads.
Pertinently, in 2023 it was reported that the count of overall public schools in Jammu and Kashmir have reduced by nearly 19 percent owing to the ‘zero or low enrolment of students in government schools’.
The officials of the department had said that it 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,” an official had informed.
The concerned official at that time had also said, “We had nearly 4300 government schools wherein the student enrolment was less than five or zero. As of now there was no such government school with zero enrolment.”
The School Education Department in the year 2022 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 hundreds of government-run-schools of Jammu and Kashmir having an inadequate student enrolment.
