Minister expresses doubt over Unicef report

The state minister for school education, Kanti Biswas expressed his doubts over the report published by Unicef on The State of the World's Children (SWCR) at the occasion of the launch of the report.

"I have found several instances where data provided in one section of the report does not match with the other portion," he explained. "I will inform the appropriate authorities about the report," he added.

Principal Secretary, school education who was also present at the occasion, said that organisations like Unicef depend of secondary data to compile reports. The analysis of the report depends on the extent of error that these data contain which often leads to wrong conclusions.

Further the timespan of these data collected has different time span which is difficult to converge. There is also a creation degree of sampling non-uniformity in the way data is collected for different data have different sampling techniques.

Nevertheless Biswas admitted that the ratio of school dropouts in the state was large and that as many as 6.5 lakh children were dropouts in the age range six to eight years, against a total population of 12 lakh in the age range.

Further in the age range five to nine there were nine lakh children were dropouts in the beginning of the academic session which have declined to four lakh now.

In the age range nine to 14 years there were 24 lakh children who were out of school in the beginning of academic session of which 10 lakh has already been some school in the state.