A study on the dropout problem of primary education in Uttar Dinajpur, West Bengal, India

The Right to Education (RTE) Act came into effect on 1st April 2010 in India, which ensures free and compulsory education to every child between the ages 6-14 years. India is currently having 8.1 million eligible students who are dropouts. Therefore, bringing them back to school has been considered as the major challenge in RTE. Despite success in enrollments, 1 out of 4 children left school before reaching Grade V and almost half before reaching Grade VIII in 2005. Thus Drop-Out seems to be the major hurdles in achieving RTE. Uttar Dinajpur is the lowest ranking district in the state of West Bengal in literacy rate and highest ranking state in dropout. The greatest challenge in achieving RTE in the district is to reduce its dropout rate in primary as well as upper-primary education. This paper sheds some light on the issues of dropout in primary education as a specific case study. There are some general perceptions regarding the causes of dropout while policy prescription requires some area specific target doctrine. The socio-economic factors often remain a non quantifiable entity, but within these constraints the paper tries to find out some directions in resolving the issue.