CM to release Rs 680.44 crore under Jagananna Vidya Deevena today

Vijayawada: Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy will be simultaneously depositing Rs 680.44 crore, under the Jagananna Vidya Deevena, into the bank accounts of 8,44,336 mothers of 9,32,235 students for the quarter April-June, 2023 in Nagari of Chittoor district on Monday. He will be unveiling plaques of various development programmes and address a public meeting besides interacting with beneficiaries and people’s representatives during the day.

Monday’s deposits will ensure that Rs 15,593 crore have been the total deposits under ‘Jagananna Vidya Deevena’ and ‘Jagananna Vasathi Deevena’. Incidentally, expenditure on reforms in the education sector in the last four years stands at Rs 69,289 crore, including towards fee reimbursement.

With the avowed aim of providing higher education to poor students, the state government is depositing money into the accounts of mothers of students pursuing ITI, polytechnic, degree, engineering, medicine and other courses without any limit on the number of eligible children in a family. In order to meet the boarding and lodging expenses of students, Rs 20,000 to those pursuing graduation, engineering and medicine, Rs 15,000 to polytechnic students and Rs 10,000 to ITI students in two installments every year.

As part of revolutionary reforms, the curriculum has been revised by including four years honours degree along with job-oriented modules and 30% skill development courses to increase employability potential. The 10-month mandatory internship is helping students to understand and cope up with the requirements of industries.

Minister for education Botsa Satyanarayana said that Andhra Pradesh is the only state to achieve more than three lakh certifications in a calendar year. He said that those who were trained and earned certifications included 1.27 lakh students in Microsoft, 33,000 in Salesforce, 24,000 in AWS, 20,000 in Nasscom, 10,000 in Palo Alto, 15,442 in data analytics, 12,709 in cyber security and 10,000 in process mining. He explained that the figure of students with Intermediate but without degrees was 81,813 in 2018-19 but, thanks to the two ‘Deevena' schemes the number was down to 22,387 in 2022-23. The minister explained that the dropout percentage in entry to higher education has dropped significantly to 6.62% in 2022-23 against the national average of 27% and gross enrolment ratio (GER) for 2018-19 was 32.4%.

Satyanarayana stated that the average number of girls enrolling in colleges per every 100 boys has increased from 81 in 2018-19 to 94 in 2020-2, with the active steps taken to encourage higher education for girls. He added that campus placements have made a quantum jump from 37,000 in 2018-19 to over one lakh in 2022-23.