Mumbai: Barely half of the entry-level seats available for disadvantaged students at private unaided schools in Maharashtra have been claimed so far, prompting the state to extend the deadline for admissions.
As of Tuesday, admissions have been confirmed on less than 54,000 out of 1.02 lakh seats reserved for students belonging to socially and economically marginalised at 8,823 schools across the state. The seemingly lackluster response stands in contrast to the sharp rise in the number of applications for these seats from last year's 2.81 lakh to 3.64 lakh this year.
While the first or regular round of admission was to end on Monday (May 8), the state has fixed May 15 as the new deadline for admitting students.
Under the Right to Education (RTE) Act, 25% of Class 1 and Pre-primary seats in private non-minority schools are reserved for children from economically weaker and disadvantaged sections. These students get education free of cost, while the government reimburses their tuition fees to schools.
While the state has 1.02 lakh RTE seats this year, as many as 94,700 of them were allotted to students in the regular round through a lottery system, taking into account the list of school choices provided by parents and the distance of these schools from students. The seats left unclaimed in the first round are allotted to other parents.
The RTE admissions were delayed this year due to a lack of clarity on making Aadhar compulsory for admitting students. The state education department later clarified that while the parents who don't have Aadhar for themselves or their children are eligible for admissions, they will have to furnish the document within a stipulated time.
According to activists, glitches in the admission portal and lack of information about the admission process are responsible for the poor response. "The website would often get hanged. There were other glitches in the system too. In one instance, a student couldn't confirm his admission to a school in Mumbai because the system showed him as already admitted to another school in the city last year," said Nitin Dalvi of Maharashtra State Student-Parent Teacher Federation.
Abid Shaikh, Pune District President, Movement for Peace and Justice, said that the government's verification committees often deny admission to students on one pretext or the other. "Admissions of some students who had minor discrepancies in their documents have been put on hold. The verification committees also demand the supporting documents that are not required under admission rules," he said.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, an official from BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) Education Department said that many parents don't take the allotted seats as they favour other schools. "The parents don't pay attention to the admission procedure," he said, adding that some verification committees are yet to upload the documents received from parents into the system, resulting in a delay of confirming seats.
