Less funds hit literacy project

Statesman News Service
MALDA, ( India) . Nov. 22. — The Malda district administration is facing problems in initiating a literacy project in the district, as funds required for this project has not been granted by the Centre through the State Literacy Mission, officials informed Monday .

The concerned authorities said that in a survey they have identified 5,24,315 illiterates in the district in the age group 15 to 35 and have decided to render free education programme through the Project for Residual Illiteracy (PRI).

The target date set for initiating the project is 1 December of this year, with a view to set up the Continue Education Centre (CEC) in January 2006, officials informed.

According to the concerned authorities, they have selected 1,229 places across the district including the municipal areas for CEC and 87 places for setting up the Nodal CEC.

A few days ago, the district literacy cell completed a training programme for the resource persons (RPs), at the district head-quarter and have started a training programme for the master trainers (MTs) and voluntary trainers (VTs) at the block-level from today itself.

“Without execution of Project for Residual Illiteracy (PRI) it will be difficult to begin the work of CEC even with the help of the gram panchayat pr0dhan and its Opposition leader, in January 2006,” a senior official said.

“The district has already received over 3 crore rupees for implementing the CEC at the block-level for a duration of six months, but the fund for PRI is yet to reach till date,” official sources said.

It may be noted that the Malda district had started the literacy programme in 1992-93 and even after completion of the Post Literacy Programme (PLP) and the Total Literacy Campaign (TLC), the district has found over 5 lakh illiterates in the district.

Owing to flood and other reasons, particularly administrative job for conducting the general and the panchayat elections, the literacy programme of the government was discontinued several times.

Even the VTs and MTs, who came forward expecting to receive honorarium for this job, left mid way because the administration could not provide them honorarium following the government guidelines.

But now it is for the first time that the government has decided to provide a decent honorarium to those who will be able to perform their duties well in this literacy programme, a district official said.

To execute the PRI and CEC programmes, nearly 26,216 VTs and 2623 MTs have been selected.

As per the present plans, there is a programme to form CEC at the grass root level, which will have two persons designated as anuprerak and saha-anuprerak for the CEC programme.

To monitor the CEC, there will be a nodal CEC, where two persons designated as mukshya anuprerak and saha mukshya anuprerak, will be posted.

At the block-level, in order to look after the total programme, non-official co-coordinators will be posted.

A saha-anuprerak will be getting Rs 500 per month and the anuprerak and the mukshya anuprerak will be getting Rs 700 and Rs 1200 respectively.

According to the government guidelines, CEC will be formed for multipurpose projects, under which at least ten programmes will be organised regularly for adult education including government programmes along with interactive session for pulse polio, sanitation and public health awareness amongst locals. #