Why in news:

• Rajasthan state has recently been witnessing a significant rise in student enrolments in government schools.
• On the flip side, it has started impacting pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) in addition to infrastructure issues.
• The PTR has swelled to 42:1 for classes 9-12 against the norm of 30:1 provisioned under the Right to Education Act.
• Various gram panchayats are currently struggling to push the local administration to construct additional classrooms and toilets in government schools in their respective villages.
• One of the village sarpanches ran a campaign which helped her in adding around 90 girls of her gram panchayat in the government school.
• It could be a matter of joy, but has become an area of concern as the school doesn’t have the space to accommodate the students, rued the female sarpanch.
• Several government schools are experiencing infrastructure shortages like classrooms, playgrounds and labs to meet the requirements of the increased number of students.
• The figure says the state has 5,19,693 classrooms including 9,136 classes as dedicated computer labs, while 41,126 required repairs in the 2019-20 academic year.
• Over the years, enrolments in government schools superseded private schools due to several reasons.
• The reasons range from introduction of different categories of schools providing education better than usual schools and massive improvement in results which has helped to attract students from private schools.
• The report says the state has 3.98 lakh teachers in 70,031 government schools having a backlog of at least 1.5 lakh teachers.
• The government has improved its quality of education than low and middle income private schools has led to rush of these students into government ones.
• On the other hand, recruitment in teaching is not regular and is marred by chronic delays leading to utter chaos like situations in several schools.
• As per eminent educationists, the spurt in government school enrolments will continue for some more years until it reaches a point when quality starts to fall.
• The education department needs to spend more money on infrastructure development like development of classes with inclusion of smart classes.
• The focus must be on improvising the existing schools rather than coming up with new schools and rationalising of teachers.