Over 12,000 students added to SDMC schools

Thousands of new faces greeted students who returned to the South Delhi municipal schools last week as an enrolment drive by the local civic body turned out to be a success.

A total of 12,050 new students were added to South Delhi Municipal Corporation school rolls during a 15-day enrolment campaign that focused on low-income neighbourhoods. The door-to-door admission campaign, Neev, was launched by Education Committee chairperson Ashish Sood on June 14 and went on till June 30.

Mr. Sood said on Monday that 55 to 60 per cent of those enrolled had already begun attending classes.

“Our biggest challenge was to convince the parents to send their children to school as many of them were breadwinners for their families. Apart from that there are children who look after their younger siblings as both parents are out to work,” explained Mr. Sood.

One of the aims of the drive was to increase the number of girls going to school and it was able to achieve this as more girls than boys signed up in each of the corporation’s four zones. A total of 6,932 girls took admission, while 5,118 boys signed up.

Now, the challenge before the Education Department is to make sure the new students keep turning up for class. “For the next 15 days, school inspectors will frequently visit all schools with the data of the new students to check if they are attending class. Also, teachers and NGO volunteers will go to the homes of those students who are not coming to school,” said Mr. Sood.

Currently, there are three lakh students in the corporation’s 589 schools and around 35,000 children in South Delhi are out of the ambit of formal education.