The District Education Department authorities of Ongole, Andhra Pradesh, have identified as many as 13,580 dropouts across the district and have decided to take up special drives to find the students and help them rejoin nearby government schools, stated a report in The New Indian Express.

"Up to Sunday, we identified and found the whereabouts of nearly 4,750 dropout students and contacted their parents. All of them agreed to rejoin their children in the schools and send them to classes immediately after the Dasara vacations without fail. Meanwhile, the special drive programme continues to find the remaining dropout students," District Education Officer (DEO) explained.

Among the aforementioned 4,750 dropout students, nearly 3,235 names have been deleted by headmasters as the students haven't been attending classes for a very long time now.

Also, nearly 1,415 students rejoined schools via a special drive programme in various areas including Ongole, Chimakurthy, Darsi, Cumbham and Giddalur mandal limits.

According to official information, there are around 3,31,750 students in all government schools in the district. In this, nearly 28,140 students took admissions again as new students of the academic year. Among them, a total of 13,580 students are on the dropouts list.

The plan ahead
In this regard, District Collector AS Dinesh Kumar directed the Education Department authorities to note the actual status of each and every dropout student of the district.

Accordingly, the DEO (District Education Officer) ordered Mandal-level officers to find out the actual facts and work with an aim to help all dropout students rejoin any of the schools across the district. Now to complete their task, the authorities are going to avail the services of concerned village/ward secretariat staff to find out the remaining 10,345 dropouts of the district.