There is an indisputable disparity in society's resources, which manifests itself in many ways including access to education and inherent privileges. The dropout rates of students throughout the country across classes remain at an extreme high. As per the data released by Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE) in 2020-21, the enrollment of students at the pre-primary level and class 1 has gone down by 29.1 lakh and 18.8 lakh respectively in 2020-21 from 2019-20. The report shows that the overall dropout rate in 2020-21 at the secondary level is 14.6 percent, down from 16.1 percent in 2019-20. At the primary level, the dropout rate in 2020-21 is 0.8 percent, down from 1.5 percent in 2019-20. Further, as the national effort's lack of adequate funds, physical infrastructure, and quality teachers, India spends only a little over 3% of its GDP on education against the benchmark of 6% that every national education policy has set since 1968, which is another hindrance in imparting of quality education to children in India. With the lack of sufficient national resources being invested in promoting quality education in our country and administrative failure in terms of efficient implementation of policies and plans, it is understood that this will not allow students, who are a product of this system to act as diligent citizens in a civil society.
For a person to survive in today’s society, a comprehensive approach integrated with a well thought strategy is required to amalgamate fundamental educational features and skill education. Though the State Council of Educational Research and Training have initiated ‘Bridge Courses’ to impart vocational training, they have yielded no real result. On discovering such statistics, the two key subthemes that were primarily incorporated in our project were imparting quality education and equipping children with technical skills. During our research on this project, we identified gaps in the way the resources like time, money, and energy were being invested to teach the less-privileged kids but no tangible benefit output was being derived. With the curriculum designed by our team, we intend to provide a cohort of 150 underprivileged students with basic education and also prepare them for admission tests for admission into schools.
We intend not to just teach them academics but also familiarize them with the social constructs (making them aware of basic life skills, method of legal redressal, gender roles, reproductive education, fundamental rights, etc.) and give them basic knowledge about how to use laptops/computers, how to use search engines like Google, and subsequently make them ready to step into civil society. The curriculum has been designed in such a manner that it’ll help these children become proficient in functioning with full ability in a civil society. This project’s end goal is to collaborate with the District Inspector of School, get their support, and get the students admitted into the various schools via the Right to Education Act, 2009, allowing children who weren’t able to gain education due to social or economic restraints to once again be a part of the formal education system.