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Goa has been losing 20 government schools per year in last decade.
Goa is shutting down 20 government schools on an average every year for lack of students. Experts claim the government itself is to be blamed with rampant approvals to aided schools which compete with government schools cannibalising the later.
Recently when the Karnataka government decided to shut down government primary schools for want of students, there was an outcry. However, Goa is going the same way and has not received much attention. For starters, any time soon, the state government will issue an order to close 16 more schools after not a single student turned up at these schools in the first month of the academic year 2016-17.
When the directorate of education conducted its census of government primary schools in June 2016, it realised that another 35 institutions will meet the same fate by the next academic session. Currently, these 35 schools have an enrolment of 5 or fewer students.
Over the last decade, 20 government schools have shut down on an average every year, bringing the total number of government primary schools in Goa down from around 1,000 a decade ago to less than 800 in 2015-16.
The education department's plan to combine 2 or more neighbouring low-enrolment schools has worked out successfully in only a handful of cases. Largely, it seems that the state administration is sitting at the sidelines and watching as government primary schools are dying a slow death in Goa.
Some officials are of the opinion that the state government itself is to be blamed for this condition.
"Only recently the state government has been cautious in granting permissions for new schools to open, because of the issue of medium of instruction at the primary school level. But, until this issue arose, new, privately-managed, state-aided schools were being freely granted permission to open when a government primary school was already doing quite well in the neighbourhood," one state official said.
Goa is one of the states with a well networked web of government schools with one school serving every 3 kilometres, a radius that has been marginally increasing in recent years, mostly at the cost of government primary schools shutting down, while aided institutions flourish.
That the parents clearly prefer aided schools is apparent. In Tiswadi, for instance, while only 1,657 students study in 40 government primary schools, over 6,000 students preferred to study cramped into 37 aided schools.
Areas where government schools are finding favour are those where students have no other choice but to attend government institutions due to transportation issues. In Sanguem, with only 4 aided schools and 56 government primary schools, students have no option but to attend the state-run institutions. The situation was similar in Dharbandora, Canaconaand Sattari.
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