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Hyderabad, Aug. 19: College education remains a mirage to majority of students belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Tribes making professional education extremely inaccessible. Though a good number of SC and ST children walk their way to primary schools and some of them even successfully cross the major hurdle of SSC, abject poverty does not allow their dream of making it to the corridors of colleges or universities materialise. Of the 29,03,778 SC students attending educational institutions in the State, 91 per cent are enrolled in schools, just five per cent are pursuing education after SSC and alarmingly only 0.6 per cent students are engaged in vocational courses, the promotion of which is a priority to the State government. The situation is worse in case of STs among whom only three per cent join colleges and 0.4 per cent vocational courses against 93 per cent school enrollment. “Thanks to the compulsory primary education and enlightenment among the weaker sections, percentage of SC/ST students enrolling in schools is high,” AP Backward Classes Welfare Association president R Krishnaiah said. According to official statistics 26,53,709 SC students and 9,69,248 ST students have been attending schools but the number dips to 1,53,163 and 32,315 respectively when it comes to their enrollment in colleges and 18,152 and 4526 in vocational courses. Explaining the reasons for educational backwardness of SC, ST and BCs, noted educationist Chukka Ramaiah said the successive governments made budgetary allocations of as high as 20 per cent to higher education and neglected primary education till 1985. This benefited only the urban upper-middle-class. Subsequently, private sector took control of higher education giving access again to the upper-middle-class which could afford the costs. “Here again weaker sections were deprived of higher education,” he said. The scrapping of reservations will harm weaker sections, he added. The welfare organisations also blame the government for its failure to provide facilities to weaker sections to pursue college education.
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