PANAJI
With several hundreds of students, mainly from the migrant communities, having never attended school, education authorities were confronted with the challenge of getting them into the education system.
Thanks to concerted efforts by education and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) authorities, NGOs and training centres, these "out of school" numbers have declined over the last three years, from 1,149 children (2014-15), 728 (2015-16) and 673 (2016-17). Figures for the current academic year have not yet been made available.
According to officials, most children are part of migrant communities from Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Bihar, having accompanied their parents employed in the fishing industry.
It is mandatory by law to provide free education to children in the age group of 6-14 years and SSA authorities took upon the challenge to get these "out of school" children into school.
The SSA had 26 centres -- 17 specialized school training centres run by NGOs and nine specialized training centres run in schools -- all across the state to train them and bring them into the education system, stated a report.
"Most of these children had difficulties in understanding the local language used in the medium of instruction. Our resource persons trained them in language skills for almost six months," said Nagraj Honnekari, Project Director of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.
All these efforts paid off and SSA succeeded in placing hundreds of "out of school" children in different schools across the State.
"During the 2015-16 academic year, about 463 children were trained and last year, about 300 children got admissions into various schools," informed Honnekari.
Incidentally, most of the "out of school" children are not located in rural areas, but in urban areas like Mormugao, Margao, Panaji and Mapusa.
With the numbers of "out of school" children declining in the State, education officials would be delighted to eventually achieve a duck in both, dropout and "out of school", innings.
