Assam Education Minister Ranoj Pegu has dismissed allegations by Raijor Dal chief Akhil Gogoi that government schools in Assam had lost 2,12,768 students over the past two years and 25,67,793 students between 2021-22 and 2024-25.
The Education Minister termed the claims misleading, attributing the decline to demographic changes and ongoing data cleansing.
“Assam has around 50 lakh students. If 25 lakh students had disappeared, it would mean a 50 percent decline. Anyone applying common sense would realise that such a claim is unrealistic,” he said, responding to a media query.
Throwing light on the trends, Pegu said the enrolment of students in government and government-aided schools had declined nationally by 4.4 percent, compared with a 4.1 percent decline in Assam.
“There are several reasons for this. One is the UDISE database, which had several ghost students. For the last three years, we have been cleaning the database, and around three lakh student names without proper verification have been removed,” Pegu said.
“The rate of decline in Assam is 4.1 percent against the all-India rate of 4.4 percent. However, Assam’s enrolment in secondary level (Class IX to XII) has shown an increase by 0.9 percent (9917 student) against an all-India declining rate of -0.6 percent,” the Minister said.
Notably, the dropout rate has declined across all levels of school education in Assam.
“Between 2021–22 and 2024–25, the dropout rate decreased from 6.02 percent to 3.8 percent at the primary level, from 8.8 percent to 5.0 percent at the upper primary level, and from 20.3 percent to 17.5 percent at the secondary level,” Pegu stated.
“Through the implementation of targeted interventions and focused schemes, we remain committed to reducing these rates even further,” he added.
Assam Education Minister Blames Data Cleansing, Demographic Shift for School Enrolment Decline; Dropout Rates Improve
