Over 2.96 crore school students across 23 states are without digital devices

NEW DELHI: Over 2.96 crore school students across 23 states are without digital devices. This is excluding over 28% of students from Chhattisgarh, 4% from Delhi, 70% each from Jammu and Kashmir and Madhya Pradesh and over 42% from Punjab. This was informed by the ministry of education to the Lok Sabha on Monday.
These details were shared by the ministry of education in Parliament as part of the response to a written question on “whether some states have seen a massive dip in the number of students that have enrolled in private schools as compared to pre-pandemic years?”
In absolute numbers with 1.43 crore, Bihar has the highest number of children without digital devices as per the data shared by the ministry.Sharing in percentage, the ministry informed the House that majority of the students in Madhya Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir are without a digital device.
States like Assam, Jharkhand and Karnataka have more than 30 lakh children without access to digital devices, while Uttarakhand has 21 lakh, such children. Other states with over 10 lakh children without digital devices are Haryana, Odisha and Tamil Nadu, while Kerala has 9.5 lakh children in this category.
The ministry also informed that in the 2019-20 academic session the dropout rate at the secondary level has been 16.1% and in the case of boys it is 17%. Some of the states with higher than national dropout rates are Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, among others.