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Data shock: Best education in Punjab
is meant for city students only
WSN Network
PATIALA: At a time
when claims of turning even the most backward region of
Punjab into nothing but
California are
unending, here is a new survey that underlines the massive
urban-centric skew. Only 3.71 per cent of students enrolled in
professional colleges of
Punjab are from a rural background, a Punjabi University
Economics Department study has revealed. Reason: complete collapse
of the rural government school education system and exorbitant fees.
Only 2,085 of the 56,240 students enrolled in professional
courses run by five state universities and affiliated colleges
during the 2007-08 academic session had a rural background. The
share of male and female students is 2.87 and 5.27 per cent,
respectively. Of the total rural students, nearly 77 per cent were
from the general category, 12 per cent belonged to Scheduled Castes
and the remaining were BCs.
The study — ‘Professional Education in
Punjab: Exclusion
of Rural Students’ — was conducted by Professors of Economics Ranjit
Singh Ghuman, Sukhwinder Singh and Jaswinder Singh Brar. It covered
Punjab Technical University, Baba Farid University of Health
Sciences, Thapar University, Sant Longowal Institute of Engineering
and Technology (SLIET), and Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law
(RGNUL).
Individual institution wise data is worse: PTU has only 2.97
per cent rural students,
Thapar University
0.30 per cent, SLIET 1.81 per cent, RGNUL 1.88 per cent and at BFUHS
4.27 per cent. The B.Sc Nursing course has a rural strength of 22.63
per cent.
Even of these rural students, a high proportion come from
educated families and only 1.5 per cent are from economically poor
households The fee structure for an engineering course at
Thapar University
is Rs 1.2 lakh, PTU Rs 71,300 and SLIET Rs 47,200. For the MBBS
course, per student annual expenditure in government medical college
was just Rs 13,500, whereas in private medical colleges, it was Rs
1.13 lakh.
15
April 2009
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