Mumbai has 18,625 out-of-school children, reports state-wide survey

Mumbai: Over 10,000 ‘out-of-school’ children were detected in a one-day survey carried out in the city by school teachers, health workers and education department officials on Saturday. [caption id=“attachment_2292646” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational Image. AFP[/caption] The initiative saw around 14,000 staff being deployed by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) to carry out the survey, an MCGM official said. The purpose of the survey according to reports is not just to reach out to all children but also encourage them to attend school and reap the benefits of Right to Education (RTE) Act. “In rural parts it will be easier to find children who aren’t attending school, but the real challenge would be to do so in bigger cities like Mumbai. In order to ensure that we reach out to all children, each official has been allocated 100 households to visit and find if all children there are attending school regularly,” said P R Pawar  to Midday. According to the Times of India report, Mumbai has 18,625 out-of-school children. Around 46,713 children across the state were reported as out-of-school students but education department officials said that reports from some places in the state were yet to be compiled. However in Mumbai there was a haphazard method of collating the information. According to the Indian Express, some surveyors resorted to ticking the walls of the homes surveyed, while others inked children’s fingers and some used a printed forms. “I was allotted slum areas between Ramabai Colony and T Y Thorat Marg in Chembur. I started at 8 am and completed 165 households but could not find a single out-of-school or dropout kid till 5 pm,” said Chandrakant Ghodekar, a teacher from Subhash Nagar Municipal Hindi School, Chembur  told Indian Express. With PTI inputs