In the heart of Bengaluru in Vijayanagar, Udaya Kannada Primary School runs on a fairly large campus. It has infrastructure such as toilets and playground, and the classrooms are full of colourful learning material prepared by students and dedicated teachers.
But the school has only 147 students studying in classes one to seven. The head of the school, Neelaveni P., teaching for close to two decades, said the number was more than double a decade ago. “Those were times when there was demand for seats in our school. Everybody now wants their daughters or sons to study in English-medium schools even if they have to take a loan. As a result, our student strength has decreased dramatically,” she said.
Enter Class 4 of the school which has 19 students with many empty benches and ask how many want to learn English, most hands go up. Catering to this demand, the management has opened another English-medium school which has over 300 students.
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This is not just a Bengaluru phenomenon. In Hassan, for instance, the number of enrolments in Kannada schools is reduced by 6,006 in the current academic year compared to the last year, while enrolment went up by 1,002 in the same period.
The statistics of the Education Department show that this is the trend at the macro level too. The enrolment in Kannada medium, which was 82.1 lakh in 2006–07, decreased to 73.07 lakh in 2013–14. For the same period, enrolment in English schools has gone up from 10.93 lakh to 20 lakh. This is despite the fact that 84 per cent of the lower primary schools across the State are run by the government, which imparts only Kannada-medium education.