What are the major problems faced by the Central government while implementing SSA?
The scale and size of this gargantuan programme is itself a challenge. And since we’re focusing on decentralised, participative and consultative planning, our effort is focused upon maximising inputs — bringing an unprecedented number of children into school. But given the huge scale of the project, many children still remain uncovered despite our sincere efforts. Getting poor children into school is a tough proposition because for their parents, it’s always a toss-up between letting children earn or getting them educated. As far as retention is concerned, we’ve tried to get around that problem by providing mid-day meals in schools. Overall we’ve met with some success as the dropout rate at the all-India primary level (classes I -V) has fallen from 38 percent in 2003 to 34 percent in 2004. Another major challenge in implementing SSA is that of language. Because each state has a different language, we need special implementation sensitivity. We first have to tackle the state language an
