Sibal proposes,Delhi ‘scrutinises’,wants more schools

Officials in the Education department,however,revealed there was a slim possibility of the proposal being implemented at all,enumerating a list of issues that pose a hurdle.

“Increasing the age from three to four years is not going to solve the problem of the tug-of-war for nursery admissions. The problem in Delhi is a paucity of schools and therefore the nursery sections,” a senior Education department official said.

The Delhi government is also blaming the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) for the chaos during the nursery admissions,claiming it was the agency’s “changed institutional land policy” that led to a shortage of schools.

Under the earlier policy,the DDA would allot land for schools at nominal rates. After the institutional land scam was unearthed in 2003,the agency changed the policy of allotment into an auction system — it reasoned that educational institutes receive tremendous financial returns and should therefore be treated as commercial entities.

“The Union HRD minister should look into the land auction policy before proposing solutions like these,” another senior Education department official said. He added due to the new land policy,under which land is auctioned to schools now,“there is an acute shortage of schools”.

“In the last seven to eight years,there has been a minimal increase in the number of schools in the city,” the official said.

On Monday,Sibal proposed to increase minimum age for formal education to six years in Delhi. “If he wants to increase the age for formal schooling to six,he should also raise the age for university admissions,which starts from 17 years at present. If children across the country can go to a university at 17,Delhi students will lose a year,” a source said.

Ashok Ganguly,former chairperson of the Central Board of Secondary Education,who introduced the points system in Delhi,seconds the government view. “The first question we need to answer is,what should be the duration of pre-primary schooling. Should it be a year or two years? After that,it has to be uniform across all types of schools — government-run and private. In a government-run school,there is no pre-primary section,thus the gap between a government school child and the private school child persists.

“The second question is,what should be the minimum age for entry in formal schooling? There is a lot of variation now in different states. Some states have five years as the entry age to Class I,while some prefer six years. This has to be made uniform across all states,” he added.

Ganguly said the entry age for university education should also be looked into. “Right now,the minimum age to get into a university is above 17 years. You cannot restrict one area and not another,” Ganguly told Newsline.

No objection,says Sheila
A day after the human resource development minister Kapil Sibal suggested the minimum age for admission to nursery classes could be raised from three to four years,Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on Tuesday said her government has no objection with the idea. “We have no objection to the suggestion,” Dikshit said. She added children often find it difficult to handle various pressures,including that of going to schools by buses. “We will examine the proposal carefully,” she said. PTI