The only time Karan, a four-year-old, gets to play with building blocks and miniature buses is during school hours. At other times, he fumbles around with an old kitchen set his mother bought for his sister inside their one-room tenement in a slum.

“We don’t have toys at home. That’s why I love school. I get food and get to play there,” he said.

A few months ago, Karan enrolled in the model pre-primary section run by Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) at Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya in Prasad Nagar, and is among the hundreds of children from financially and educationally backward sections who would have otherwise ended up staying home.

A year ago, the SSA, a flagship programme of the central government, started these model centres at 300 schools run by the government and civic agencies across the city to boost enrolment and to check dropout rates. Many children, as a survey undertaken by government officials two years ago found, quit school to take care of their younger siblings.

Delhi was the first to introduce these models running in existing schools and funded by the SSA, officials said, even encompassing mobile schools that target migrant and out-of-school children.

While under the Early Child Care and Education (ECCE) scheme of the government, pre-school classes are being run in the aaganwadi centres under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme, the SSA and the Department of Education officials saw the need for setting up model centres in existing schools to supplement the government’s efforts.

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