VIJAYAWADA: The stage is set for disbursement of total fee reimbursement to students for the quarter October-December 2022 at a programme to be held at Tiruvuru in NTR district on Sunday. Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy will credit Rs 698.68 crore into the bank accounts of mothers of 9.86 lakh student beneficiaries at the programme by clicking the button.
In the last 45 months, the YS Jagan Mohan Reddy government has paid Rs 13,311 crore under the Vidya Deevena and Vasathi Deevena schemes, including the previous dues. “The Chief Minister wants to encourage every student from poor families to pursue education without fear that whether they can afford or not. Irrespective of the number of children in a family, the total fee reimbursement scheme will be applicable to all the eligible students and there is no limit to number of beneficiaries,” said a government press release on Saturday.
The objective of the scheme is to ensure that no student is left out from pursuing their dreams of higher education, be it degree or engineering. Further, to ensure that the burden of lodging and boarding for hostlers does not fall on the parents, Vasathi Deevena is being implemented, providing Rs 10,000 to ITI, Rs 15,000 to polytechnic, and Rs 20,000 to degree, engineering, medical and other students in two spells.
The reason for crediting the amount into the bank accounts of the mothers of student beneficiaries is to enable them to question the college management if anything is wrong or short of what it should be.
The State government, which is focused on bringing reforms in education for making students future ready, has made changes to the curriculum with job-oriented concepts and even introduced four-year honours courses with 30% of the courses being skill development ones. Most importantly the 10-month compulsory internship programme has been introduced to make students industry ready.
The government has signed MoUs with Microsoft for providing skill training to 1.62 lakh students in 40 different courses. As of now, 1.07 lakh have already been trained in Microsoft technologies and 73,000 are being trained in other advanced technologies.
Andhra Pradesh is the only State in the country with 1.75 lakh students to get certification in one calendar year. According to the release, the Jagan Mohan Reddy government’s efforts are yielding good results which are evident from the decrease in the number of students discontinuing education after Intermediate from 81,813 (20.37%) in 2018-19 to 22,387 (6.62%) in 2022-23.
Gross Enrolment Ratio in degree colleges has increased from 32.4% in 2018-19 to 37.2% in 2020-21. Now, efforts are on to take it to 70%. The number of girls joining higher studies after Intermediate was 81 for every 100 boys in 2018-19 and it increased to 94 in 2020-21. Campus placements too have increased from 37,000 in 2018-19 to 85,000 in 2021-22, it added.