43% of Class 9, 26% of Class 11 failed: Report

SDMC gets awarded for LED lighting ■ ‘ Govt schools have poor quality education’

The South Delhi Municipal Corporation ( SDMC) on Thursday earned laurels at the national level by bagging the prestigious first prize for the conservation of energy through its LED replacement programme in the municipal sector.

President Ram Nath Kovind bestowed National Energy Conservation Award on SDMC Commissioner Dr Puneet Kumar Goel for his efforts and inspiring leadership for successfully executing the world’s largest LED replacement programme in short time.

The award was presented in a national level function organised to celebrate the National Energy Conservation Day, 2017 at Vigyan Bhawan.

According to a senior SDMC official, the SDMC is annually saving around nine crore units of energy under the ‘ Street Lighting National Programme’ launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The total connected load of 2,80,000 sodium vapour streetlight has been reduced from 37.50 MW to 18.31 MW.

“Earlier the SDMC used to pay ` 28.5 crore per annum for line maintenance. However, same has been reduced to ` 8.32 crore per annum, therefore total saving on account of energy consumption and line maintenance will be approximately ` 85 crore per annum. Apart from this the project will result in curbing CO2 emission by 65 thousand ton annually,” he said. In a worrying trend, 43 per cent students of Class nine and 26 per cent of Class 11 in Delhi government schools did not get promoted in the academic year 2016- 17.

Overall out of the 2,19,377 students who got enrolled in Class nine in Delhi government schools in the 2013- 14 batch, around 96,525 did not reach Class 12 in 2016- 17.

The findings were a part of an annual report on the state of public school education in Delhi by Praja Foundation. The figures indicate that almost half of the students did not move to secondary education level through examination, the report said.

The officials of Praja Foundation, while presenting the report, termed this as the “big gap” in the Delhi government’s education system and also said that a question needs to be asked if so many students are deliberately held back in an attempt to avoid the drop in pass percentage in board classes.

Linking the transition rate of students to Classes 10 and 12 to the new detention policy ( NDP), the report blamed the quality of education and said that the main purpose of the NDP was to improve learning levels but that did not happen as teachers kept on promoting students without focusing on learning levels.

Moreover, 85,412 students dropped out in MCD and state government schools in the year 2016- 17 even as total enrolment fell down by 1,76,743 students ( 7 per cent fall) from 2013- 14 to 2016- 17 in MCD ( fall by 93,444 students) and state government ( fall by 83,299 students) schools. However, the enrolment in the year 2016- 17 in state government schools improved by 1 per cent.

The data further represents a bedraggled picture of Class one enrolments over the years in Delhi government and MCD schools with 1,92,820 enrolments in 2010- 11 to 1,35,491 in 2016- 17 - a drop of 30 per cent.

Nitai Mehta, Founder and Managing Trustee of Praja Foundation said, “Teacher quality and budget allocation is there but no constraint on resources. The budget estimate being set by the state government at ` 49,740 per child”.