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RTE admissions to go online in UP

Gayathri | Friday, October 7, 2016 8:28 AM IST

The admission process under Right to Education (RTE) in Uttar Pradesh will be conducted online from next academic session for easy scaling, improved transparency and better child tracking.

Chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has directed the basic education department to introduce the online system, saying it will help in completing the admission process faster. Yadav believes that the online system will help draw more admission forms and more children from economically weaker section will be able to get admission.

The state government will introduce the fully integrated Management Information System from January 2017 to help speed up the admission process which otherwise runs up to July. Presently, the entire thing is done manually.

UP has a potential of 6 lakh admissions each year under RTE’s section 12(1)(c). Using an online system would improve capacity, efficiency as well as transparency and as the demand goes up in the coming academic sessions, the current system won’t be able to handle such a large volume, an official said.

This system would also help track children once they are in the school system. With over 20,000 admissions in UP in the last two years, the present manual management system for application and its processing are cumbersome leading to delays and inefficiency.

“This year Maharashtra, Delhi and Karnataka rolled out an online MIS system for RTE section 12 implementation across their states,” she added.

More than 15,000 students have enrolled in schools across 49 of 75 districts in Uttar Pradesh this year so far under the right to education act that mandates 25% reservation for children from economically and socially disadvantaged sections in private unaided institutes.

This is more than 3 times compared to last year when 4,400 poor children got admission in over 500 private schools in only 26 districts. The total number of children admitted in 2012, 2013 and 2014 was only 108 in the state.

The maximum number of students to get admission under the act were in Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency, where 3,318 poor children are now going to school.

India enacted the landmark RTE act in 2009, giving children from poor and other disadvantaged backgrounds the right to free and compulsory education to the age of 14. UP formed the RTE rules in 2011 but they were implemented only in December 2012.