Parents are no longer clamouring for a seat under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act quota after the State government amended the rules to prioritise government and aided schools. Admissions for only 28% of the total 7,346 seats allotted during the first round under the reservation quota have been completed.
Though the last day to complete admissions in the first round is May 15, as of Tuesday evening, only 2,086 out of 7,346 parents had completed admissions for their children. The number of seats and applications, too, have declined. This trend is the result of new rules which mandate that a child can be admitted to a private school under the quota only if there is no government or aided school in the locality. The move had drawn flak from several parents who were hoping to admit their children into private schools.
Many parents are willing to take loans to fund a private school education. Priya S., a domestic worker, who had applied for admissions for her son for class 1, said, “I applied for seats in an aided school as a back-up option. I want to send my child to an English-medium school and I managed to mobilise loans for the fees, so I will pay and send my child to a private school rather than opting for an aided school.”
B.N. Yogananda, general secretary of RTE Students and Parents’ Association, said the process was meaningless with no seats in private schools. “In many cases, parents were misguided by various people and applied to aided schools. But after allotment, when they went to the school, they learnt that it is an aided school and did not offer an English-medium education,” he said.
Anticipating low demand this year, the DPI, which usually conducts a minimum of three rounds of admissions has decided to conduct only two rounds to fill RTE quota seats.
The number of seats too have declined from 1.52 lakh seats last academic year to 17,720 seats this year. Similarly, last year, saw 2.38 lakh applications, which has fallen to only 18,399 applications, of which only 16,563 applications were eligible for the lottery process. As many as 643 schools, both aided and unaided, received no applications.