Punjab govt failed to better infra for secondary education: Study

Tribune News Service

Karam Prakash

Patiala, September 19

Low income families in urban areas of the state are being denied access to secondary education, revealed a study.

Simply put, no government senior secondary school has come up in Punjab cities for decades. The government educational infrastructure in cities is not catching up with the rise in urbanisation. On the contrary, there is a continuous increase in the count of private schools in cities, stated the report.

In Patiala, no government higher secondary school has been built after 1970, while in Ludhiana and Amritsar no such institution came up after 2000. Similarly, no aided senior secondary school came up in Patiala city and Ludhiana after 1960.

This was revealed in a study titled ‘Growth and Development of Secondary Education’, conducted by Mandeep Kaur, who was a research scholar at Punjabi University.

The study also highlighted that ward-wise population was not considered during the establishment of the senior secondary schools.

Secondary education begins at Class IX and lasts till Class XII.

Besides, only 1.4 per cent of government schools had only English as the medium of instruction in Patiala while there was none in Ludhiana and Amritsar. Around 47 per cent schools in Patiala, 79.15 per cent in Ludhiana and 73.77 per cent had only Punjabi as the medium of instruction.

The study suggested that the state government should establish a new government and grant-in-aid schools in urban areas. The researcher also suggested that the medium of instruction should be multilingual so that enrolment could be increased.

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