New Delhi: Nearly 6 million children remain out of school in India and most of them come from Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim communities.
This was disclosed recently by federal Human Resources Development Minister Smriti Irani while answering a question in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament.
Such staggering number of school dropouts has occurred even after government implemented welfare schemes such as the Right to Education and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, a campaign for to universalize primary education, twocircles.net reported.
A detailed analysis of the numbers presented by Irani shows that the total number of children out of school from these three communities was nearly three times higher than that of the other communities. In other words, 75 percent of the children out of school are from Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim communities.
Of the 6 million dropouts, 32.4 percent belong to the Schedule Caste or Dalit while 25.7 percent are Muslims. The corresponding number for Schedule Tribes stands at 16.6 percent.
In 2014, an organization called IMRB, in a survey, had shown that the most children out of school are from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In UP, the number of children outside school stands at about 1.61 million. They include 560,000 Dalit, 557,000 Muslim and108,000 tribal children.
Similarly, Bihar has 1.17 million children outside school. Among them, 524,000 are Dalit, 246,000 Muslim and 31,000 tribal.
Goa has no children in the age group of 6-13 outside school. Lakshwadeep and Puducherry follow with 267 and 285 dropouts.
In Dadra and Nagar Haveli, there are 745 children out of school with 172 of these students belonging to the Schedule Castes.
The ministry has taken an initiative to calculate the total number of children outside school and take steps to address the issue. For this, a meeting was organized between National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and the ministry.