Centre's new scheme aims to bring out-of-school girls back to classroom

Bringing out-of-school girls back to the education system has been the target since the Right to Education Act was promulgated

As a record number of girl children in the age group of 11 to 14 years – over 6.85 lakh – were heading to schools, the Ministry of Women and Child Development announced a scheme to encourage over 4 lakh girl children back to classrooms. As part of the move, the ministry said that it will be delinking girl children in that age group from anganwadi systems.

The new scheme, the Kanya Shiksha Pravesh Utsav, is a joint initiative of the WCD as well as education ministries, and was launched under the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme. It will be driven by the anganwadi system, officials said.

Launching the scheme, WCD secretary Indevar Pandey said that the need to come up with the new scheme was necessitated after the number of beneficiaries of the Scheme for Adolescent Girls (SAG), aimed to look at the nutrition of out-of-school girls, were getting less traction. He said that in 2018-19, 11.88 lakh girls were beneficiaries of the scheme, but the number came down to 5.03 lakh in 2021. This means that while over 6.85 lakh girl children were heading to classrooms in 2018-19, 4 lakh girls had either dropped out or were never inside the school system, but were coming to anganwadis to avail supplementary nutrition and skilling.

In some states, the number of beneficiaries was low. For instance, Himachal Pradesh had only 275 girl children under the SAG scheme, officials said. The ministry, Pandey said, will be phasing out girls aged 11 to 14 years out of the anganwadi system, and the under the scheme will encourage the out-of-school girls to go back to school.

Under the new scheme, anganwadi workers and helpers will carry out a mapping of the girls in the anganwadi and the list will then be shared through DPO and CDPO to the district education officer. “The Education Department will then send the girl child to schools, or special training centres or for vocational training or to open schools, as appropriate,” the secretary said. The Education Ministry’s Prabandh portal and the WCD ministry’s POSHAN tracker will be used to identify these girl children. A set of guidelines will be out soon.

To incentivise this, the ministry under the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme will be handing out monetary rewards to anganwadi workers for counselling and taking them to the school system. “If there are 4 and more than 4 girls in a particular anganwadi, the worker will get Rs 1,000 as incentive. If there are less than 4 girls, she will get around Rs 500,” Pandey said.

“In our new scheme, under Poshan 2 and Saksham Anganwadi, we will be only taking up girls in the age group of 14-18 years. Girls aged 11-14 years will not be coming in the anganwadi system in new schooling that will also take care only of the northeastern states and all our aspirational districts,” he told reporters.

The ministry provides supplementary nutrition to girls aged 14 to 18 years in the form of take home ration and hot-cooked meals irrespective of them being in school.

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