The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) School Board has opened over 60 new primary schools in the city in the last five years, while also merging almost 140.
As per AMC School Board data, the civic body merged the most municipal primary schools in the academic year 2017-2018, with 90 mergers. As many as 20 schools were merged with nearby schools in 2020-’21, and 13 in 2021-’22.
The reasons cited for the decision initiated five years ago by authorities are low enrolment and high running costs in sustaining such schools. At present, nearly 459 municipal schools across the city have around 1.68 lakh enrolment.
“Along with fewer students, there were other reasons such as two different schools upper primary and lower primary running parallel in the same building or in close vicinity. Such schools have been merged,” said AMC school board administrative officer LD Desai.
“These have been merged with nearest schools taking into consideration all factors so that no student and staff has to suffer. Also, with the merging of schools, running these schools is easier now,” he added.
While the merged schools are majorly Gujarati-medium, preference is given to English-medium schools among the new municipal schools built in the last five years. For instance, 18 new municipal schools with an English-language curriculum were opened this academic year. Ten new schools were opened in 2021–20, 10 of which were English–medium schools.
Similar was the case with previous years when among around 10-12 new municipal schools, majority were English medium, which the authorities stated is based on a “demand survey”.
Among 497 government primary schools merged across the state, nine schools had zero enrolment. Over 130 schools had an enrolment between one to 10 students while another 107 schools with 11 to 20 students.