Date:14/07/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/07/14/stories/2007071453590600.htm

Andhra Pradesh

Gulbarga zone accounts for State’s 55 per cent out-of-school children

Bageshree S.

There are 80,863 out-of-school children in 7-14 age group in the State
NGOs say this figure could be 10 times more

Bangalore: Just five out of 27 districts of Karnataka account for over 50 per cent of out-of-school children in the State. The provisional statistics emerging from Child Census 2007 show that of 80,863 out-of-school children in the age group of 7 to 14 in the State, 44,663 (55.23 per cent) are from Gulbarga zone. There are 75,75,220 children in this age group.

This is no surprise, considering that districts in Hyderabad and Karnataka routinely figure at the bottom of human development indices. Poverty, illiteracy, lack of infrastructure and large-scale migration, as a fallout of severe agrarian crisis, has led to children from the zone remaining out of school, says Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan State Project Director L.K. Atheeq.

What is surprising, however, is that Bangalore zone has the second highest number among the four zones, with 15,808 children out of school, as against Belgaum (12,715) and Mysore (7,680). Mr. Atheeq says this trend too is a result of migration, with a large chunk of out-of-school children in a city like Bangalore coming from families that had moved out of villages in search of livelihood.

SSA is yet to analyse the data for patterns on the lines of caste and religion. “Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Muslim children accounted for a large number of out-of-school children in the last census,” says Mr. Atheeq.

SSA plans to take up many special programmes, especially in Gulbarga zone, to bring more children to school.

Dispute on numbers

The Government statistics on out-of-school children have been contested by non-governmental organisations working on child right issues. As on March 31, 2003, out-of-school children in Karnataka stood at 10.54 lakh. It is said to have come down to 1.61 lakh in March 2006. According to the latest census figures, 1.07 per cent of children in Karnataka are out of school. NGOs working with child rights issues say the figures are about 10 times more.

“This is not a realistic number,” says Niranjan Aradhya of the Centre for Child Law. “We did a re-census at Bannikuppe Panchayat in Ramanagaram in March. While the SSA census showed four out-of-school children, we came up with 24.”

While one is the tendency to underplay the problem to “show signs of progress”, the other is that the census enumerators take into account the running age of the child rather than the completed age.

“A child who is 13 years and nine months should not be treated as 14,” he says.