Schooling was never so much fun. Instead of crying and wailing toddlers being dragged to school on the first day, Gujarat has made school enrolment an annual festival where new entrants are welcomed with toys, toffees and textbooks.

More so, in the rural areas where enrolment is traditionally low and drop-out rate high. Worse, girls are often kept away from school to help in household work, look after siblings or even married off early.

Despite being a highly industrialised State, Gujarat lagged behind in some of the social indicators such as health and education until very recently. In terms of overall literacy as well as in female literacy, Gujarat was marginally better than the country’s average number in 2001 census.

To overcome this, Gujarat government adopted two separate programmes involving the entire administrative machinery in the State to implement Kanya Kelavani Rathyatra and Shala Praveshotsav, to address low school enrolment and drop out issues, and Gunotsav to improve the quality of education and teachers.

The main objective of Kanya Kelavani and Shala Praveshotsav is to ensure 100 per cent admission and bring down drop out at the primary levels to zero per cent. Started in 2003, the programme is conducted for three days at the beginning of the new academic session in June every year when the entire State administration including the chief minister, ministers, and all levels of bureaucrats visit the primary schools and participate in the school admission process.

The children taking admission in Class 1 are welcomed in the presence of the village community and the meritorious students of higher classes felicitated. Each child enrolled in a government school automatically comes under the health insurance scheme. The result has been impressive, with the net enrolment ratio rising to 98.8 per cent and substantially bringing down the drop-out ratio of Class 1 to V to 2 per cent in 2009-10 from a high of 17.83 per cent in 2003-04. Similarly, the drop-out ratio in Class 1 to VII which was 33.73 per cent in 2003-04 has been brought down to 7.56 per cent in 2011-12.

To make the implementation effective, each officer of an elected representative visits at least 15 villages after a common briefing cum training session to acquaint the officers with issues and what they are expected to do when they go to a village. All IAS, IFS and IPS officers are also involved in this exercise.
“We identify the children to be enrolled in schools while they are still at the anganwadi centres so that there are no out of school children,” says Mansoori Zarina Bano, an anganwadi worker at Mautanda village in tribal-dominated Sabarkantha district. The villagers here are either farmers or casual workers who leave early and would not even consider it necessary to enrol their children in schools, but now the community itself is involved in ensuring that every child goes to school. “My two daughters go to school and the teachers are very good,” says Kamini Vanjara who is also a vocal member of the school management committee.

The State government’s Kanya Kelvani Nidhi has a corpus of Rs 58.37 crore and this fund is used to sponsor children for higher education and vocational education. So far, Rs 20.28 crore has been utilised and 45,348 children benefited. Gunotsav is a programme for annual rating of every primary school and every teacher to enhance the level of teaching and learning. This is done every year in November for three days and all officers and elected representatives spend one full day in a school to independently assess its performance and compare it with the self appraisal done by teachers. The schools are then graded and teachers sent for training if found not-up-to the mark. Within three days 9,000 schools of the 32,000 primary schools in the State are randomly assessed. “The idea is not to compare one school with another because urban schools would certainly grade better than rural ones, but just to improve,” Manoj Aggarwal, Commissioner (Mid Day Meal) told The Hindu. Initiated in 2009, Gunotsav has made a noticeable change in the levels of learning in schools with the percentage of schools getting more than 6 out of 10 points, an increase from 26.22 per cent to 43.91 per cent in 2011.

- Aarti Dhar (The Hindu)