Assam: Over 6 lakh school students unaccounted for in UDISE+

Staff Reporter

Guwahati: It is a matter of great consternation for the state education department officials that there are 6,00,297 school students in the state who are unaccounted for and who were neither imported nor the status of students marked in the Unified District Information System form Education Plus (UDISE+) 2024-25.

The Mission Director of Samagra Siksha, Assam (SSA), has written to the ADCs, Inspectors of Schools, District Mission Coordinators of SSA, and DEEOs to circulate the list of six lakh unaccounted for students to the concerned schools through Cluster Resource Centre Coordinators (CRCC). This will enable the Head Teachers (HTs) to identify the students and mention the status of the students as per the options available in UDISE+ as Imported, Migrated, Other mode of study, Dropout, Duplicate, Wrong Entry, or Death against the students list and submit the report to SSA by November 12, 2024 without fail.

The status of students identified by the HTs of school will be collected by Cluster Resource Centre Coordinators (CRCCs), and a report will be submitted to block-level officials. The block officials will compile the list and submit it to districts before updating it into the UDISE portal.

It is to be mentioned that the identification of these ‘missing’ students is very crucial at a time when students have been allotted Personal Education Number (PEN), the unique identification number for students in India that is assigned by the Union Ministry of Education. PEN is issued only through the UDISE portal. Moreover, the state education department has introduced the registration of a lifelong 12-digit Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry (APAAR ID), and all schools are enrolling students in this registry.

According to UDISE+ 2023-24, there are 32 lakh students with valid IDs in the state.

However, the spiralling dropout rate remains a source of concern for educationists in Assam and the Education Department. As per UDISE 2022-23, the average annual drop-out rate in Lower Primary in the state during 2022-23 is 8.49 against 6.02 in 2021-22, while this rate was 4.3 percent in 2019-20 and 3.1 percent in 2018-19. The drop-out rate in the Lower Primary level registered the highest of 22.52 percent in South Salmara, followed by 14.54 in Karimganj, while the lowest is 4.02 in Sivasagar.

Likewise in the Upper Primary level, the drop-out rate was 10.33 in 2022–23 and 8.81 in 2021–22. In the upper primary level, this rate is highest in South Salmara with 32.29 percent and the lowest of 4.03 in Sivasagar during 2022–23. The transition rate from primary to upper primary in the state is recorded as 89.7 percent.

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