4-state HRD meet over school funds

Union ministry of human resource development (HRD) secretary Anshu Vaishya chaired the 15th project approval board meeting of the Rashtriya Madhyamik Siksha Abhiyan here on Tuesday. 

Senior HRD officials of four states, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Jharkhand, are participating in the two-day meet. 

The focus was on Orissa and Chhattisgarh on Tuesday, while Jharkhand and Bihar will come under the glare on Wednesday. 

RMSA aims at ensuring 100% enrollment of students in secondary schools by 2017 and 100% retention of students by 2020. During the project approval board meeting, all the four states have been directed to come up with detailed proposals for achievement of enrollment and retention targets. 

Accordingly, the Union HRD has decided to fund establishment costs of new secondary schools, strengthen infrastructure of existing schools, help in capacity building of teachers through regular and rigorous training modules and adopt other innovative measures for providing quality education to students under the secondary education system. 

"All the states have prepared their own route map for the development of education infrastructure keeping under consideration the targets set by the HRD ministry and after verifying their claims we are going to approve the budget for respective states," said Vaishya. 

Making a presentation on behalf of the Orissa government, HRD secretary Aparajita Sarangi said 1,480 schools are required in the state to cover remaining areas out of which work on 700 schools is already under progress. She said that a total of 8,880 secondary schools are already functional in the state. Seeking immediate release of Rs 14 crore to meet salary requirement, she expressed happiness when the Union HRD secretary gave the nod for 60 per cent of the net allotment of funds. 

Sources in Jharkhand HRD said that after the recent transfer of departmental secretary Mridula Sinha, the state is not fully prepared for the meeting but based on the work initiated earlier in the state, they would try to seek the maximum monetary support for RMSA schemes. 

At the beginning of the meet, Vaishya clarified that the RMSA funds are in addition to what the state spends on its own projects. 

"Depending on the utility of funds sanctioned earlier, the Union ministry agrees to fund projects which are in addition to what the state is already undertaking," she said.