Malappuram: The shortage of plus one seats in Malappuram district continues to be a sticking point as the government has not come up with a structured plan to resolve the crisis.
Education Minister V Sivankutty on Monday announced the government would allocate 14 new batches available in other districts to Malappuram.
“The lack of plus one seats in Malappuram should not be seen as negligence towards the district. We would allocate the extra 14 batches available in other districts to Malappuram,” Sivankutty said.
However, many believe the move would not be enough to meet the demand. As per the aforesaid plan suggested by the minister, the district would only get an extra 700 seats with the addition of 14 more batches when in fact it needs 10,526 more seats.
Protestors are demanding the implementation of the V Karthikeyan Nair Committee report which recommends the addition of seats according to the percentage of students passing the SSLC examination.
Malappuram district has received 80,922 applications for the 69,696 plus one seats available. The district would need around 200 more batches to admit all the students who passed the SSLC examination.
The state has a total of 4,58,205 seats available for the plus one batch in which 15% of seats are located in Malappuram district. However, this is not sufficient to accommodate all the students eligible for plus one admission. The opposition political parties and organisations that are protesting against this point to the shortage of plus one seats in the district as a clear sign of negligence towards the students here. They said they will continue their protest until a permanent solution to the seat shortage is arrived at.
Meantime former Education Minister P K Abdu Rabb said the LDF government is not serious in finding a solution to the plight of the students in Malappuram.
“The last UDF government allocated 1,300 extra batches of plus one seats to solve the crisis. The then govt upgraded high schools into higher secondary schools. All these measures added 84,000 more seats in Malabar. The LDF government has not taken any such initiative in the last seven years to increase the batches or seats in higher secondary schools. The gravity of this issue would become clear when we compare the 94-95% pass ratio at that time to the 99.7% pass percentage of the current period,” he told Onmanorama.