Post Covid, ‘ghost students’ reason behind 4.6L drop in enrolment: Pegu

Guwahati: Assam has reported a whopping 4.5 lakh drop in school enrolment post Covid, between 2021-22 and 2022-23 academic sessions.

While elimination of the names of “ghost students” is one of the prime reasons behind the plunge in school enrolment, education minister Ranoj Pegu said that “filtration” of the student data will help in effective implementation of the government schemes. He refused to accept the word “dropout” for this fall but called it “rectification of data”.

Pegu said the actual scenario of fluctuation of enrolment in the state will be reflected next year after the “eradication of ghost students” this year.

“We were suspecting the presence of ‘ghost students’ in many schools. These ‘ghost students’ are those about whom schools send data of their presence but actually they do not exist. There were many venture schools (privately managed but government recognised), who used to provide such false data, even when they had nil enrolment,” Pegu told the media here on Monday.

He said the motive behind spiking up the student numbers by the school managements may be to get extra funds by means of obtaining more students’ uniform and showing midday meals expenditures.

Data furnished by the minister revealed that there has been an overall drop of 5.95% student enrolment, from pre-primary to Class XII, since the previous academic session (2021-22).

The student enrolment in the state’s schools was 75,44,956 (as per UDISE plus portal data) in 2021-22.

But with the comprehensive launch of SDMIS (Student Data Base Management Information System) in the year 2022-23 by state government, details of each student — their names, parents and guardians’ names, address, Aadhaar numbers were collected and as on June 10, the enrolment was found to be 70,95,759 — a drop of 4,49,197 students.

Prior to 2022-23, enrolment of students was collected from Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE plus) maintained by the Centre, where the government had to rely on the entries made by the school authorities.