GURUGRAM: School enrolment numbers for the 2021-22 session in Haryana have set off alarm bells.
More than 12 lakh students registered with private schools last year have disappeared from the radar.
The sharp plunge showed up in data on the state government’s MIS portal, where all enrolled students are registered.
There are just 17.31 lakh students enrolled at private schools this session, according to this data, which was released by the directorate of school education.
This is a sheer 42% drop from 29.83 lakh in 2020-21.
Enrolments in government schools have, meanwhile, gone up by 8% — from 21.78 lakh in 2020-21 to 23.6 lakh in 2021-22.
Last year, around 1.4 lakh students of private schools had shifted to government schools amid a raging fee dispute as the lockdown eroded incomes and the current mode of education became unaffordable for them.
The school education directorate’s report highlights the trend of private school students shifting to government institutions, but no one quite knows how to explain the huge gap of 12 lakh students registered on the portal.
A bureaucratic exercise has begun to find out, amid concerns that the pandemic had led to a staggering number of dropouts.
Education department officials and private school associations TOI spoke to pointed to several reasons behind the fall in enrolments — scores of private ‘budget’ schools shutting down, many migrant families returning to their home states and the digital divide that online classes created.
The state government, however, said the gap is a result of private schools not updating their data on the portal.
Additional chief secretary (education) Mahavir Singh told TOI, “These kids are most certainly not school dropouts.
Every year, private schools have to update their records before the new session begins.
In this session, their records reflect that data of around 12 lakh students has not been updated.
Based on our meetings with district education officers, we have found out that these kids are missing from the records because private schools have not updated their data on the MIS portal.” Referring to the raging fee dispute, Singh accused private schools of employing pressure tactics of blocking online IDs of students and not updating the MIS portal to force parents to pay the fees and “mislead” the government into believing these were dropouts.
“Schools cannot strike off the names of students as it will invite action under the Right to Education Act.
So, they have just not updated their data on the MIS portal.
We have given them two weeks to update the data or face strict actions,” Singh added.
Private schools’ associations said schools had uploaded student data as they do every year and asked the government to recognise the ‘dropouts’ problem, for which they blamed misleading orders passed by the state on fees and online classes.
Associations claimed the fee dispute that rocked the education sector last year had led to the closure of more than 1,000 private schools across the state in 2020.
TOI could not independently verify this number.
Kulbhushan Sharma, president of the National Independent Schools Alliance, a body of budget private schools, said, “The state government had no idea about the digital divide when schools were ordered to shift to online mode.
Big schools managed to stabilise their academics but budget schools suffered.
And while these schools were grappling with the unprecedented challenge, the government came up with a populist order to defer school fees.
Statements by some ministers created a sense that parents need not pay the fees.
As a result, many schools had to shut down.” School officials TOI spoke to said with online classes set to continue this year, some parents have opted for home-schooling or enrolled their children at government schools as an interim arrangement to tide over this difficult phase.
That does not, however, explain the wide gap of 12.5 lakh students.
Associations also claimed government schools had better enrolment numbers because of “unfair means’ they had employed.
Col Pratap Singh (retd), district president of the Haryana Progressive Schools’ Conference, said, “They are using their might to pull us down.
They have to show improvement in their enrolments to counter their poor performance in online education.
Thus, they have violated the mandatory requirement of a school leaving certificate (SLC).” An educational department officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said schools’ associations had been making several misleading claims but admitted such a large enrolment gap could not be explained by schools not updating MIS data alone.
“Of course there have been dropouts.
There are many families — be it of casual workers or executives in white collar jobs — that have migrated back to their hometowns.
That must be factored in.
Many parents are finding it more feasible to go for home-schooling as well till till physical classes resume and the pandemic ebbs.
Once we get the MIS data issue fixed, we’ll know the real extent of the disruption caused by the pandemic,” the officer said.