UNIVERSALISATION OF EDUCATION IN ODISHA: A GOVERNMENT INITIATIVE

Education is an important input for empowering people with skill and knowledge and giving them access to productive employment in future. It is an important input as well as output indicators influencing other development indicators of social sector such as health, nutritional status, income, family welfare and others. Both primary and secondary education deserves the highest priority for increasing the competence of the average worker and increasing National productivity. As the provision of universal elementary education is crucial for spreading mass literacy, the provision for secondary education is significant for economic development, modernising social sector and for effective working of democratic institutions. Secondary education serves as a link between the elementary and higher education and plays a very important role in this respect. Since universalisation of elementary education has become a constitutional mandate, it is absolutely essential to push this vision forward to move towards universalisation of secondary education which is already been achieved in a large number of developed countries and several developing countries. The recent focus on secondary education was generated by the 2005 Central Advisory Board of Education Report (2005) and the Rastriya Madhyamik Sikhya Abhiyan (RMSA) initiated in 2009-10 to universalize secondary education by making quality education available, accessible and affordable to all children within the age group of 14-18 years with strong focus on the elements of gender equity and justice. This paper studies the access to an equity and quality in primary and higher secondary education classes (IX-XII) in Odisha and examine some idea for improvements in each. KEYWORDS: Democratic institutions, Initiatives, Literacy, National productivity, Universalisation