Good response to admissions under RTE too, says official

The RTE is being implemented in the state effecting 25 per cent reservation for students belonging to the disadvantaged and weaker sections in all private non-minority self-financing schools at entry level such as LKG and Class 1.

A senior official from the Directorate of Matriculation Schools said the admission under RTE Act has been made online from 2017-18 to stop malpractices and to ensure transparency. “This year the RTE online admissions should have started on May 3. However, due to COVID-19 pandemic, the process began only on August 27,” he said adding “in less than 30 hours, more than 15,000 applications were received from various parents.” He said though all the management of private schools were instructed to make arrangements for online RTE admissions in their respective institutions’ portal, many of them have not included the facility. “Therefore, we have asked those schools to immediately facilitate RTE online admission,” he said, “From Monday, the number of applications is expected to cross 40,000.”

Stating that last year the total number of applications stood at 1.20 lakh, the official said that this year it was expected to cross 1.50 lakh enrolments. Due to financial crisis, many parents, who had pay cuts because of COVID-19 lockdown, will also apply for their children through the RTE route, he reasoned. He said that apart from filing online enrolment in the school portal, the government had also made arrangements for the parents to file application at block level education offices and e-Seva centres across the state.

The official also said that if the number of eligible applicants is more than the intake capacity of a school, a random selection method would be adopted.