VVF, comprising 40 to 50 youngsters in each of the 337 village panchayats, collected this data, along with specific reasons why these children were not in schools.
The southern district introduces a web-enabled programme to monitor and reduce the rate of school dropouts
CHENNAI: Four months ago, Chinna, a nine-year-old boy from Undialnatham tribal village of Krishnagiri district in Tamil Nadu, was a ‘watchman’ at a mango orchard in the neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. Sleeping on the ground, he had contracted a skin disease and took to his father’s habit of drinking toddy. On Tuesday, he joined the first generation of some 600 children of the Irula tribe - and 7,000 others - to go to school.
About 30 km away, at the district headquarters, collector Santhosh Babu’s personal computer tells him if Chinna and 7,600 others enrolled under the ‘back2school’ programme are still in school or, if any of them had dropped out, what needs to be done to bring them back.
Work on the project started in July last year with a census of out-of-school children. A village volunteer force (VVF), comprising 40 to 50 youngsters in each of the 337 village panchayats, collected this data, along with specific reasons why these children were not in schools. “The idea is to give no valid reasons for the parents to keep their children out of school. Often they cite livelihood problems which we help solve and insist that the child be in school,” says Babu.
Arbiter Infotech, a Chennai-based company developed a software for feeding and analysing the data, besides integrating all the government departments with the programme. “The system works beautifully,” says B Veeraputhiran of Arbiter Infotech. “Whenever the collector logs into the site, a pop-up dash board tells him about each dropout and the probable reasons. He can instruct the department concerned for action and also monitor the action taken on a real-time basis.”
P Ganesha Murthy, a UNICEF consultant who worked for the project says enrollment of children from the Irula tribe was a tedious task. In a place called Pettamugilalam, there were more than 500 children in 56 habitations who were to be the first generation learners. A majority of them were malnourished and it took us more than two months to make them healthy enough to attend a school,” he says.
Of the 8,667 identified out-of-school children, only about 1,000 remain be enrolled. The administration plans to bring them on the rolls before the beginning of the next academic year.
Retaining them in schools, says Babu, is the next challenge, which the administration is equipped to meet.
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