Education status poor for children with disabilities

Vikas Sharma

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Tribune News Service

Jammu, January 3

With a population of over 80,000 differently abled children/children with disability (CWD) between the age group of 5-19 years in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, the education status of these special children continues to be poor.

Sources said the main reasons behind the poor education status of the CWD in J&K were lack of training on education of children with disabilities, lack of confidence in teaching children with disabilities, under-resourced classrooms, specifically in terms of resources for children with disabilities, lack of administrative support, fear of affecting the academic performance of the whole class, and lack of prior contact with persons with disability.

The poor education status gauged from the fact that the overall percentage of children with disability between age group of 5-19 years attending the educational institutes is 61 per cent. The boys’ percentage is 63 per cent while the girls percentage is just 58.3 per cent.

Further, 32.4 per cent such children have never attended the schools. The percentage of boys is 30 per cent, whereas the girls percentage is 35.4 per cent. In terms of the enrollment of the CWD at the secondary and higher secondary level, there is not much difference.

Only 736 boys and 662 girls were enrolled in Class IX and X at the secondary level in J&K, whereas the strength of enrolled students in Classes XI and XII at the higher secondary level is 212 boys and 230 girls. States like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala, Odisha, Tamil Nadu were way ahead of J&K with enrollment in thousands of children with disability.

“Poor utilisation of Central funds by successive governments in J&K is also responsible for the prevailing grim scenario. An amount of Rs 81.21 lakh was sanctioned by the Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry for over 2,700 specially abled students in J&K during 2015-16 but only Rs 49.6 lakh was utilised by the government”, an official said.