Kohima, May 12 (DIPR): A team of officials from the Ministry of Human Resource Development, government of India – the SSA team – held a meeting with officers of the SMA, DMA, SCERT, DIET, KGBVs, IGNOU, NCERT, Nagaland University (MI), Health & Family Welfare and PHE department (health, water & sanitation issues) at Hotel Japfü this morning.
Chief Secretary of Nagaland and chairman for SSA, SMA, Lalthara, IAS, who chaired the meeting, said that the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) is one of the biggest programmes introduced by the government of India and that Nagaland is fortunate to be a part of the curriculum. He assured all possible cooperation and support in his level for smooth functioning of the various schemes under SSA in the state. Additional Chief Secretary Banuo Z Jamir said that the meeting was more of an interactive session with the sister departments with whom the department of School Education is converging to relate to various issues pertaining to SSA.
Addressing the meeting, SSA team leader and Director of MHRD, Neelam Rao, expressed her happiness with the state government’s approach that no untrained teachers would be recruited henceforth. She appreciated the fact that the state is also looking at programmes for training the untrained teachers who are already in service, and mentioned the need for the state to evolve very intensive programmes so that all the teachers are trained in a span of two to three years time. She was pleased to know that Nagaland has really worked on its textbooks, thereby helping in bringing down the cost of the textbooks, and further said that the state is looked upon as a resource in this matter. Rao also expressed appreciation that many schools have been upgraded to Middle School level.
The team leader outlined the objectives of their visit to Nagaland and said that they would be deliberating on various issues like attendance of children, prevention of dropouts, strengthening of the Management Information System, use of data in the local set-up, looking at other tools of surveys, etc. Rao further underlined the need to look at how the Management Information System in Nagaland can be utilised in the local level and also to initiate discussion on Management Structure at the state & district level and the need for convergence with the H&FW department, PHED, etc., to address related issues.
Chief Consultant Shalendra Sharma gave a PowerPoint presentation on the ‘Status of Elementary Education in Nagaland’ where he gave a complete overview of the shift from 2003-04 to 2008-09. The presentation touched on gross enrolment ratio, drop-out rate, gender & age-group share in ‘out of school’ children, gender gap in enrolment, pupil teacher ratio, educational development index (EDI) in Nagaland based on the District Information System for Education (DISE) in 2007-08, etc.
Secretary for PHED, Zaleo Rio, and Executive Engineer K Krose also took part in the deliberations related to water and sanitation programmes being implemented by the department of PHE for the schools. Rio expressed viewpoints for smoother and faster execution of the construction works undertaken by the department, including increase of unit cost for construction of toilets in schools under SSA.
The other team members in Nagaland include Under Secretary for MHRD, Ravi Chand, Chief Consultant for TSG, Binay Pattnayak, TSG Senior Consultant K Gopalan, Chief Consultant Dr. Anupriya Chadha, Senior Consultant for TSG, NE Cell Guwahati, Papori Baruah, Prof. S. Jena from IGNOU, TSG Senior Consultant Abdullah, Consultant at Gender Unit, Kiran Dogra, Consultant for Planning, Tarun Gupta, Consultant at TSG, NE Cell Guwahati, Pallav K Das, and Senior Consultant for SSA, NCERT, S C Mehta.
