ROURKELA: The Sundargarh administration seems to have no clue about the steady drop in number of students taking the matriculation examination of the Board of Secondary Education (BSE), Odisha in the tribal-dominated district over the last five years.
For the 2023-24 session, a total of 23,578 students including 203 ex-regulars have enrolled for the summative assessment (SA) 2 of the matriculation exam. Of them, 22,720 are appearing the exam which commenced from March 10. Despite appearing the SA 1 test, 655 students have missed the SA 2 this year.
In 2022-23, 25,997 students including 715 ex-regulars had enrolled for SA 1 exam of the BSE. During the SA 2 test, the number further dropped to 25,118.If the two academic years are compared, the number of students appearing the Class X exam dropped by 2,419 in 2023-24.
During 2021-22, the matriculation exam was not held due to Covid-19 pandemic and all the students were declared pass by the state government. At least 26,833 students had enrolled for the test. Compared to the total enrolment of 24,627 in 2020-21, there was an increase of 2,206 students taking the exam in 2021-22.
Sources in the School and Mass Education (SME) department said the number increased in 2021-22 because authorities of many schools enrolled all students on their own due to disruption in classroom studies for the pandemic.
Notably, a total of 28,366 Class X students including 2,046 ex-regulars had enrolled for the matriculation exam in 2017-18 academic year. If the enrolment figure of 2017-18 is compared with 2023-24, there has been a drop of whopping 4,488 students taking the Class X exam.
While the SME officials didn’t have any clear idea about the reason behind the downward trend, sources said while some students may have moved to other boards, the others are likely to have stopped pursuing education.
District education officer (DEO) AK Pradhan said it is possible that around 1,000 students may have moved to the Odisha Adarsha Vidyalayas (OAVs) in Sundargarh which offer CBSE courses.The rest are likely to have moved to other private English medium schools of CBSE or ICSE. Many students may have also quit studies for socio-economic reasons including family issues. There is no effective mechanism to track students dropping out of government schools, the DEO added.
