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TN unveils impressive elementary education plan

The Tamil Nadu government has come out with a policy to ensure that in the next two years every village in the state has an elementary school within a radius of one kilometre.

In his speech circulated at the state education ministers' conference, state Education Minister Professor K Anbazhagan said his state had set up 36,269 primary schools in 15,822 villages, and there were only 700 habitations without a school within this range. The government had opened 300 schools this year and another 400 would be started next year. Construction of buildings for 1,384 schools had been taken up during the current year, he added.

Welcoming the idea of constituting a national elementary education mission to integrate various programmes that were under implementation in this field, the education minister said organisation of state and district level institutional framework should be left to the discretion of the state to take note of local variations.

He said the state had achieved 95 per cent enrolment in primary schools thanks to various steps taken by the government like mid-day meal scheme and distribution of free textbooks.

The gap in enrolment and retention of boys and girl still remained a problem area. The government was also engaged in enrolment of children in scheduled caste and scheduled tribe areas.

Professor Anbazhagan said the World Bank assisted district primary education programme was under implementation in seven of the 29 districts and the mid-term assessment revealed a significant impact on primary education in these districts. The state had sought extension of this programme to additional districts where the girls' literacy level was lower than the national average and the problem of child labour was predominant.

He said his state endorsed the approach to lay greater emphasis on specific sectors like vocational education and computer education. It would be necessary to prepare a comprehensive infrastructure development programme which could be taken up for funding by external agencies. The Centre should support the efforts of the state, he said.

He also expressed strong reservations on some of the recommendations, made by the group of experts, and annexed to the agenda of the conference. In a pluralistic society, the inclusion of material highlighting one religion would lead to undesirable divisions in society. Such matters sow seeds of disaffection in society and should be eschewed, he added.

He said TN also opposed making Sanskrit a compulsory subject in view of the commitment of the state to the two-language formula.

On the higher education scenario, the minister said there were 11 universities, 112 engineering colleges and 197 polytechnics besides 408 arts and science and physical education colleges. He wanted the All India Council for Technical Education to ensure that the consent of the state was obtained before granting permission for new engineering colleges.

The Punjab government stated at the conference that it strongly supported the inclusion of moral teachings of great men and their biographies in textbooks with an object to create awareness among youth about the rich heritage of the country.

State Minister for Education Manjit Singh Calcutta said, ''India is a land of saints and sages. Its thousands years of civilisation has given birth to a number of religious and sects. It has a vast corpus of literature and thought having bearing on each facet of human life.''

He said even the modern concepts and theories and science and management can find relevance in ancient thought, that it was imperative that the young mind is made aware of the Indian culture.

Calcutta said in spite of being a rich state, the literacy rate in Punjab was much below several other states, there was urgent need for about Rs 5.17 billion to provide only basic infrastructure to primary schools alone.

He urged the Centre to provide funds to fulfil the objective of bringing down the drop out rate at the middle school level.

Supporting the Centre's proposal of setting up the National Elementary Education Mission, he said the state government should be allowed to divert funds, allocated under the mid-day meal scheme to other education related schemes.

UNI

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