UTTARAKHAND’s KUMAON DIVISION ON THE VERGE OF CLOSURE OF more than 1400 schools
The pathetic situation with regard to education that prevails in Uttarakhand makes us all worried tremendously. On the one hand we all claim that Uttarakhand is the hub of education with high profile elite schools for the ultra rich students functioning from here like Sherwood, Doon school, Ecole Global, Birla Vidya Mandir, Asia School , Wellham Girls and Boys School, Wood stock school, St Mary etc etc thousands of government primary, middle and intermediate schools are being abruptly closed. This deteriorating trend of diminishing government schools in the interiors of Uttarakhand’s Garhwal and Kumaon divisions unambiguously points towards the corrupt, apathetic, negligent and ineffective education system and those sitting at the helm of affairs in the government. This sounds really worrisome that on the one hand Uttarakhand was rated as number one region in entire Uttarakhand Pradesh in terms of literacy rate as is Kerala in India but today due to massive migration and villages becoming human less more than four thousand government schools have been closed including about three to ten thousand villages of Uttarakhand becoming ghost villages with more that thirty lakh people leaving the Himalayan state before and after the state came into separate entity on 9 th November, 2000.
Lot have been said and written in this regard and debates, seminars held in and outside Uttarakhand but the hard fact remains that while more than fifty percent of the lands in Uttarakhand have been sold to outsiders, more than 60% agricultural lands have not been ploughed for decades with majority of it becoming barron with tall treas grown on them including large shrubs not prine for farming.
As a result Uttarakhand is today confined to the territorial limits of the state capital Dehradun, towns, and plains like Haridwar, Udham Singh Nagar, Nainital, Almora, Champawat, Pithoragarh, Lansdowne, Mussoorie etc making them tremendously congested and pollution oriented with villages rampantly vacant and assembly seats likely to decrease considerably during the next delimitation to be held in the near future.
As if this was not enough in the Kumaon division of Uttarakhand which is considered to be more progressive and hectic in terms of development about 1453 schools are on the verge of extinction ( closure) if the recent report of a national newspaper’s regional edition is to be believed.
According to the latest report about 1453 schools of Kumaon division have come under the danger zone due to the negligible numbers of students coming to these schools.
Apart from these schools about four thousand schools have less than fifty students reveals the Dainik Jagran report.
These schools are on the verge of closure.
The government have spent crores of Rupees under its programmes of Samagra and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan during the last three decades but the level of school education due to alleged corruption and apathy of the government in terms of not providing adequate teachers and failing to improve quality of education in Uttarakhand government schools, has further deteriorated resulting in parents getting their wards ‘ names cut from schools and migrating to cities, towns and metropolises. The latest report of the Education department is even more worrisome which unambiguously states that about 227 primary and 38 middle n his gh schools of Kumaon are with zero students. Not only this but the primary schools which have less than ten students have numbered to 1275 and middle n high schools to 178.
