Amid Midday Meal Woes, Govt. to identify 5,000 Pupils for NEET & JEE Coaching

The Panjab School Education Department has started identifying 5,000 students of Class XII from the science stream in government schools to make a group of ‘Super 5,000.’ The students will be especially prepared for medical and engineering entrance tests (NEET & JEE). In a letter to all school heads, including meritorious schools, the department has asked them to identify at least 10% of the total students in the class. There are 1,972 schools with class 12th. If every school sends an average 5 students, it is close to 10,000 students. What also remains unanswered is if promising students are just 3% or 8% of a class, would they be denied coaching? We know given the downfall of education in the state, many good students have moved to private schools. Are these private school students not entitled to coaching? In other school-related news, after the education department approved the inclusion of bananas in the midday meal for government school students under the Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman (PM-Poshan) scheme, a debate erupted over the choice of fruit. Farmers demanded instead of bananas, locally grown kinnows should have been included in the menu. INC Member of Legislative Assembly from Abohar, Sandeep Jakhar, wrote to CM Bhagwant Mann urging him to consider including locally grown fruits/vegetables such as kinnow and carrots in the midday meal menu so that farmers could also benefit. The midday meal scheme has other pitfalls. The government has made it mandatory to offer poori-chole once a week. The complaint is that teachers in charge of such elaborate meals were held up for almost the whole day. (SDW Vol. 2 Issue 1, Story 7).