Indira Bal Rath extended to all students
PTI, PANAJI | 28 May 2012 21:13 IST
Goa government has decided to extend its flagship 'Indira Bal Rath' scheme to the students of all castes, creed and religions, as against the earlier policy of making it available only to SC, ST and OBC students.
Director of Education D P Dwivedi, in a circular issued last week, has said that all the government-recognised aided secondary and higher secondary schools and special schools are eligible to provide the benefit under the scheme to the children, irrespective of their class, creed, castes, religions and languages.
The then Digambar Kamat government had designed this scheme to provide school buses to students to ferry them from their residences to school free of cost.
The scheme was only applicable for those schools where scheduled caste (SC), scheduled tribe (ST) and other backward classes (OBC) students were present in large numbers and only the students from those categories were eligible to get the benefit under the scheme.
Dwivedi said that the objective of the scheme was to provide transport facilities and support to the children, who have their residences in areas that are remote from taluka places and district headquarters in the state.
This scheme, he said, aims to arrest the drop-out rate amongst the children and save their time and energy.
The circular has requested the heads of government- recognised aided secondary and higher secondary schools and special schools, who have not availed this benefit to apply to the Department of Education.
