If number of schools equaled educational success, Meghalaya should be right up there with the top states of the country. Instead, the state is often close to the bottom of national rankings even though it has many times the number of schools that it apparently needs.
Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma recently spoke about the ‘Challenges of Education in Meghalaya’ wherein he listed some surprising figures for his audience.
Although it has a smaller population than Tripura (based on the 2011 census), Meghalaya has nearly three times more schools, 14,582 compared to 4,929. Manipur, with a similar population to Meghalaya, has only 4,617 schools. Additionally, Meghalaya has an unusually high number of aided schools, whereas other states have relatively few. Nationally, aided schools account for less than 5 percent of the total number of schools but in Meghalaya this proportion is 29 percent.
While other North East states may have their own problems with education, Meghalaya ranks below all the other regional states according to the Performance Grading Index 2.0, though its scores have been improving in the last few years.
To look further afield, Kerala has a population of 3.34 crore, which is roughly 10 times that of Meghalaya but it has roughly the same number of schools – 15,864. Similarly, Himachal Pradesh, which has a more challenging terrain than Meghalaya, has 17,826 schools, serving a population of 68.64 lakh.
This disproportionate number of schools in Meghalaya has resulted in skewed student enrollment, with many schools reporting very low student numbers, including some with zero or just a few students.
Across the state and across the various categories of schools, there are 206 that have no students whatsoever and another 2,269 with fewer than 10 students each. Among deficit and ad hoc schools alone, there are 18 with no enrolment and 1,141 with single digit enrolment.
Among SSA schools there are 30 with zero students and 268 with fewer than 10. And in government schools there are 11 with zero students and 143 with fewer than 10.
One reason for why small Meghalaya has so many schools is that the institutions are taking advantage of the way the government distributes grants to schools. In this way a single school is often counted multiple times in the data. For example, a hypothetical XYZ School could be counted as four separate institutions even if it is managed and owned by the same entity, with a separate Lower Primary, Upper Primary, Secondary and Higher Secondary sections that functioned as individual schools. This would allow the management to draw on government aid through the SSA system, ad hoc grants and deficit grants.
According to the data presented by the CM, 6,702 out of the 14,582 schools in Meghalaya could actually be grouped into 3,029 by eliminating the double counting. However, that would still leave more than 10,000 individual schools in Meghalaya, which is still more than other comparable states.
