NEW DELHI: Over 85,000 students from municipal and government institutions dropped out of the school system in the 2016-17 academic session. This and other revelations were contained in NGO Praja Foundation’s annual report on the state of education in the capital. Citing data collected through Right to Information applications, the report disclosed a 7% fall in enrolment in municipal and state government schools since last year and a 30% drop in the entry-level Class I since 2010-11.Given the numbers, Praja questioned the concern of elected representatives about education because 25 MLAs and 147 councillors did not raise a single issue on the subject in their respective legislative bodies throughout the year.The study, which has been divided into seven parts dealing with enrolment, dropout, quality of education (based on Class X and XII board exam pass percentage), learning outcomes, expenditure, household survey and deliberations, also pointed out that 44% of Class IX students in 2013-14 didn’t reach Class XII in 2016-17, while 43% of the Class IX students of the 2015-16 batch didn’t graduate to Class X in 2016-17.Municipal schools appeared to show a continuous decline in enrolment in the past three years, though the schools run by Delhi government bucked the trend with a 1% point increase. The decline reflected the findings of the household survey, where 58% of the parents sending their kids to corporation schools expressed unhappiness about the quality of education and 47% of parents of government school students similarly being unsatisfied with the quality of education.Anjan Ghosh, senior vice-president of Hansa Research, to whom Praja Foundation had commissioned the household survey, said, “An alarmingly high percentage (85%) of students taking private tuitions belong to municipal schools and 74% to state government schools. This could be in correlation with the percentage of parents (29%) not being happy with their children’s school as the primary factor.”In all 85,412 students from the municipal and government schools were reported to have left school in 2016-17. Anjali Srivastava, assistant programme manager, Praja, said, “In the pre-Right to Education days if a student stopped coming to schools, the name was struck off the register. However, now a student has to get a transfer certificate in order to get admission elsewhere. The 85,000 dropouts are cases where the students have gone missing from the schools without either having taken transfer certificates. They are still marked ‘absent’ in the school records as their names cannot be struck off the rolls under the provisions of the RTE Act.”The entry-level enrolment doesn’t present a rosy picture either, with the numbers dipping from 1,92,820 in 2010-11 to 1,35,491 in 2016-17. While conjecturing that the dearth of resources with the municipal corporations could be to blame, Nitai Mehta, founder of Praja Foundation, said: “In terms of the infrastructure, teacher quality and budget allocation, there seems to be no constraint. The corporations fare well on the student:teacher ratio, the quality of teacher is above average and the budget estimate of the state government is Rs 49,740 per child.”Milind Mhaske, project director, Praja, said, “The government gives out data that makes it look good, but when you dig deeper, you can detect major issues in the education department. Unless the government acknowledges these issues, it will be difficult to bring about any required change or improvement in the education department. These issues need to be addressed and acted upon soon. The future of the children in Delhi is at stake.”