State of municipal education in Greater Mumbai shows no improvement as compared to previous years and continues to be telling of education standards of the municipality. Praja Foundation’s   latest report on municipal education says that there is a decline of around 40,778 students in the last five year cumulatively, i.e. more than 9 percent.

 

As compared to previous year (2014-2015), there was a drop of 2 percent students from nearly 1252 municipal schools across the city as compared to previous year. Fresh enrolments have slipped down except for English medium schools. Marathi medium schools have shown the sharpest decline in enrolment with -19.50 percent followed by Tamil medium schools with -15.31 percent. Conversely, English medium schools have shown a rise in enrolments with 14.77 percent.

The report also said that 13 students out of every 100 dropped out of school in the said period.

Lack of quality education and teachers have been cited as main reasons for parent’s dissatisfaction at the municipal school education.  
About 44 percent parents have cited lack of quality education and 42 percent parents have blamed poor quality of teachers.

The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) plans to spend Rs 50,534 per child, students are given free education, school inspectors rank the quality of teacher in these schools as excellent and as per the internal CCE and the RTE Act most students are getting more than 60 percent marks. Infrastructure compliance too is almost 100 percent. However,  despite the increase in budgetary allocation for education, it is not getting translated into higher enrolments in schools run by MCGM. Under the Sixth Pay Commission, municipal employees are getting Rs 6000 (per child) for school education. MCGM spent about 1.68 crores in 2014-2015 under the scheme. 

Milind Mhaske, project director, Praja points out, “Out of the total 227 councillors, 166  have not asked a single question on the issue of education during the period of April 2014-March 2015. Whereas if we look at the number of questions raised by the education committees members it is abysmally low with 58 in 2014-2015.”

Nitai Mehta, founder and managing trustee, Praja, says, “If we want to make this country a knowledge economy, programmes like Digital India, Smart Cities and Skill India a success, basic education of the country should be improved especially at the primary level. Elected representatives should raise issues of education more at the designated forums.”

The survey was carried out on 22,850 households and data was compiled with the help of RTI queries.