Students who cleared the SSLC exams from six districts in Malabar are facing an acute shortage of Plus One seats this year too.
The Malabar Education Movement, a Kozhikode-based non-governmental organisation that has been working towards the betterment of the education sector in this region, has accused the State government of launching the admissions process this year without properly addressing this issue.
Its general secretary O. Akshay Kumar and vice-president K.A. Nasar told the media on Tuesday that no steps were being taken to implement the recommendations of the V. Karthikeyan Nair Committee that was set up to study the scenario. The committee is learnt to have suggested shifting excess Plus One batches to districts that face a shortage and sanctioning of new batches for such places.
Mr. Nasar and Mr. Akshay Kumar claimed that though the committee submitted its report to General Education Minister V. Sivankutty recently, indications were that none of its proposals were going to be implemented.
They said that when 2,59,839 students cleared the SSLC exams in Thrissur, Palakkad, Malappuram, Kozhikode, Kannur, Kasaragod, and Wayanad districts, as many as 1,57,238 people became eligible for higher studies in the southern districts. While 21,325 Plus One seats were lying vacant in the Travancore-Cochin region, a total of 55,611 students from Malabar might find it difficult to get admissions anywhere. Even if the seats were increased by 30%, a total of 18,538 students would be out of schools, they claimed.
According to the data collected by the movement, 62% of the total number of students who cleared the Class 10 exams in the State are from Malabar. However, the region has only 55.6% of the available higher secondary seats, 43.7% of the vocational higher secondary seats, 42% of the seats in Industrial Training Institutes seats, and 49.2% of those in polytechnic institutes.
The movement functionaries pointed out that 75% of the students who sought admissions to the open school system in the State in the past seven years belonged to Malabar. Mr. Nasar said that at a time when ensuring quality education was one of the sustainable development goals declared by the United Nations, a large number of students in Kerala were forced to depend on low-quality open school system. He said that the Kerala government had been trying to develop the State as a knowledge economy and allocating funds in the budget for the purpose. If the crisis in the higher secondary sector was not addressed, these attempts would turn out to be futile, he added.
