Schemes to prevent school drop-outs in Manipur launched

Our Correspondent
Imphal, March 17 (EMN): In an effort to prevent school drop-outs, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led coalition government which turned one year on March 15 launched two schemes – StartUP Manipur and Lairik Tamhanlasi (Let them Learn).
Chief Minister N. Biren Singh, Education Minister Th. Radheshyam and Agriculture Minister V Hangkhanlian, Chief Secretary RR Rashmi, Principal Secretary (Planning and Education) Vineet Joshi, Directors of Education and Planning departments attended the formal launching session of the two schemes at Chief Minister’s secretariat on March 15.
Speaking on the occasion, the chief minister said that the objective of Lairik Tamhanlasi scheme is to ensure that no child is left behind to get their basic right to education up to the higher secondary stage of education (Class IX-XII) by providing the cost of admission/examination/tuition fees, uniform and text books to the government schools students. A particular cell would function where the education department would be the facilitator of the scheme. In this regard, a sum of INR 16 crore has been earmarked in the annual budget, he added.
“The step of the government was taken up considering the issue of high school drop-out reports due to the financial constraints in the families of the students,” said N Biren Singh. “A survey by the education department officials found that there is around 40,000 drop-out students in Manipur.”
StartUP Manipur would enable youths/unemployed persons in the state to take up new ventures with new and creative ideas, said Biren Singh while adding that under this scheme, a sum of INR 30 crore is available for the year 2017-18 and 2018-19 and upto INR 3 crore is available to individual Start-Ups.
The official website of the StartUP Manipur scheme (www.startupmanipur.in) was formally launched during the day’s small but meaningful gathering.
Sharing his thoughts, Education Minister Th Radheshyam expressed the need to take up counselling sessions with both the students and parents about the essence of getting education not only taking up the steps to avoid huge students drop-out from the schools. These two schemes StartUP Manipur and Lairik Tamhanlasi scheme would benefit the unemployed youths/entrepreneurs to become job creators and to those students who couldn’t afford their basic education.