Ministry of Education and NIOS Initiative to Re-enrol 2 Crore Dropout Students

Key facts

• The Ministry of Education (MoE) convened a high-level meeting chaired by the Secretary of the Department of School Education & Literacy (DoSEL), Sanjay Kumar, to reintegrate over two crore dropout children into the schooling system.
• Citing the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), the MoE noted that more than two crore children between the ages of 14 and 18 are currently not enrolled in any school.
• The initiative aims to provide access to senior secondary education paired with employable skills through the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) frameworks of the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) and State Open Schools.
• The operational blueprint for the programme includes the systematic identification of out-of-school children, deployment of trained facilitators, and the use of app-based monitoring tools.
• In the first phase, the initiative will be piloted across 10 districts in Odisha, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Delhi.