Kerala Achieves Lowest School Dropout Rate in India

Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala, which stands out from the rest of India with 94 percent literacy rate, has achieved another distinction of having the lowest dropout rate of school students in the country at just 0.53 percent.

The hilly district of Wayanad with a sizeable scheduled tribes population had the highest overall dropout rate of more than one percent, while in all the other 13 districts the rate was less than 0.5 percent, shows an economic review report by the State Planning Board (SPB).

The latest report shows that currently there are 12,644 schools in the state of which 4,620 are government-run, 7,161 are aided schools and 863 are non-aided schools. The thickly populated Muslim district of Malappuram with 1,427 schools had the most number of schools in any district.

However, enrolment of students in the current fiscal decreased by six percent over the previous year and touched 39.86 lakh. The SPB report attributed this decline to the changes in the demographic pattern owing to low birth rate in the state.

While the national birth rate figure stands at 22.1 per 1,000, in Kerala it is 14.8 per 1,000.

The total number of teachers in schools dropped marginally from 1,68,062 in 2010-11 to 1,66,939 in 2011-12.

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