It’s just empty benches and classrooms in 2,097 Telangana schools

As per the UDISE plus report for 2023-24, a total of 2,097 schools are devoid of a single student, highlighting the grim situation of School Education in the State.

Hyderabad: It’s just empty benches and classrooms in over 2,000 schools, highlighting a harsh reality of school education in the State. This has come to the fore in the latest Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE) plus report, which has been released by the Ministry of Education.

As per the UDISE plus report for 2023-24, a total of 2,097 schools are devoid of a single student, highlighting the grim situation of School Education in the State. In fact, Telangana achieved the distinction of standing third State in the country with a high number of schools with zero enrolments after 3,254 West Bengal and 2,167 Rajasthan schools. Despite zero enrolments, the Telangana schools continued to have 2,000 teachers on the rolls.

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Another mind-boggling data that has come to limelight was 5,985 schools with a total of 88,429 student strength had single teachers. The State was home to 42,901 schools with a total strength of 72,93,644 students and 3,41,460 teachers under all managements during the academic year 2023-24. Further, the enrollment in the government-run schools has come down from 33,03,699 in 2021-22 to 30,09,212 in 2022-23 to 27,79,713 in the academic year 2023-24.

The State recorded a zero dropout rate till the upper primary school level. However, students were not keen on pursuing further education as dropout rate went up to 11.4 percent with 13.3 per cent boys and 9.5 percent girls dropping out of the school at the secondary level.

Further, out of 42,901 schools 11.8 percent recorded less than 10 students enrolment and only 8.7 per cent schools had more than 500 enrollments.

Another detail that emerged is about schools not having toilets for both girls and boys. As per the report, out of 29,383 girls schools 2,017 do not have toilet facilities and of the remaining ones, 2,277 toilets were not functional. As for boys, 4,823 out of 28,689 schools do not have toilet facilities and toilets in 2,618 schools were defunct.