By TwoCircles.net Staff Correspondent,
Thiruvananthapuram: The state government has decided to provide higher secondary courses in 178 schools in Malabar. This will reportedly create 22000 new seats. The decision was taken in the cabinet meeting and announced by the Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan in the press conference.
The new courses would be allotted to panchayats including those without higher secondary courses at present. Higher secondary courses will be allotted to 10 model residential schools also. The classes are reported to begin this year itself. The decision is supposed to solve the education problem in the northern districts of the state.
Thrissur district will get 34 higher secondary schools, Palakkad will get 36, Malappuram 27, Kozhikode 31, Kannur 30, Kasargode 12 and Wyanad will get eight schools. The northern districts were short of higher education opportunities and it became acute when the success percentage increased in SSLC in the recent years. While the southern districts had no enough number of students to fill the higher secondary seats, the northern districts had no enough seats to provide educational opportunity for all the students.
There was a shortage of about 38000 seats for plus one in the seven districts from Thrissur to Kasargode. There have been strong protests by different organizations in the area against the continuing ignorance of the successive governments towards the education problems of Malabar. The ruling alliance of LDF also in a meeting asked the government to allot more courses and put an end to the problem. This forced the ruling LDF government to consider the matter seriously. The government decided to allot new higher secondary courses to panchayats with no higher secondary courses or to those without adequate seats. Applications were invited from the schools and a final decision made on the matter.
Around 2.35 lakh students passed the 10th standard in Malabar but nearly half a lakh of students would not be able to study in the higher secondary, polytechnic, vocational higher secondary institutions etc in Malabar. The government increases the number of seats every year but the increase is not in conformity with the increase in the number of students passing exams.