Proposal to merge schools to come up in next Cabinet meeting: Minister

Education Minister Rohit Thakur said on Tuesday that a proposal to merge high schools and secondary schools with less than 20 and 25 students, respectively, would be taken up in the next Cabinet meeting.

“Officials have been instructed to provide data on the number of students in senior secondary and high schools in the state,” Rohit told reporters here.

He cited the example of the imbalance in the student-teacher ratio at Government Senior Secondary School at Hansa in Lahaul and Spiti district where there are eight teachers for just two students.

He said, “We have set a yardstick to merge or downgrade high schools where the number of students in Class V to X is 20 or fewer and senior secondary schools where the number of students in Class VI to XII is 25 or fewer.”

The goal, Rohit said, was to foster a healthy competition between government and private schools to ensure quality education for students in the state.

He said enrolment in government schools had declined by 5.13 lakh students in the past two decades. The merger of schools was happening not just in Himachal but also across the country and 76,000 schools had already been merged, he claimed. Earlier, 1,100 primary and middle schools in the state with a low student number were merged, he said.