HYDERABAD: The state government is in pre-event euphoria ahead of the launch of its Right to Education (RTE) festivities from Monday, but several problems continue to dog the effort: Unequal distribution of teacher posts, absence of a student monitoring system. poor infrastructure, lack of coordination between the School Education Department and the Rajiv Vidya Mission (Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan), to name just a few.The RTE has a long leeway to cover in AP: More than 60 per cent of the children who join school drop out before they reach Class X.Andhra Pradesh is one of the laggard states as far as implementation of RTE is concerned. Though the Centre brought in the RTE Act in April last year, the state government did not issue guidelines for its implementation till November-December.According to a recent finding, more than 20 lakh children below the age of 14 in the state have never been to a school. TYhe number of children who dropped out of school during the last year is more than 1.25 lakh.During a video-conference with district collectors recently, primary education minister S Sailajanath pointed out that the enrollment in government schools has been decreasing and increasing in private schools at the same time. “The state and central governments together spend nearly Rs 25,000 crore on education in the state. But we have failed to curb the school dropout rate and AP is among the bottom five states with regard to literacy rate,” he lamented.Recently, officials of the School Education Department found that 25,818 teachers posted to schools around the state had little or no work. So they took up a rationalisation of teacher posts. In all, about 42,000 teachers were transferred from their current postings during counseling recently.But teachers unions are up in arms. “In the name of rationalisation, we are being harassed. We are not against rationalisation but the government should look at problems like infrastructure, which too have an impact on enrollment and dropout rate,” said Andhra Pradesh United Teachers Federation president N Narayana.A senior education official admitted there is no monitoring mechanism in place to ensure that the enrolled children stay in school. “Though we enrol students under the Rajiv Vidya Mission and other programmes, we have no system of monitoring them. From this academic year, teachers will have to monitor enrollment and dropouts apart from informing the higher authorities on a regular basis,” he said.Apart from taking up enrollment, the state government will also commence work to build infrastructure as part of the Education Fortnight programme to be conducted in all districts commencing from Monday.
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