Five years on, little progress made to centralise Eklavya schools’ administration

Ever since the government revised the EMRS scheme in 2020, it has aggressively sanctioned new schools, with a total of 728 Eklavya schools sanctioned till February 28, of which 477 are functional. File image: Special Arrangement

Five years after the Union government introduced fresh guidelines to elevate its flagship Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRS) for tribal children to the standards of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas by centralising their administration among other measures, little progress has been made.

Proposals to begin the second round of centralised recruitment for over 6,000 school staff, to set up regional offices to administer the schools, and to raise the recurring cost per child per year to make them on par with the JNVs, have all been held up at various levels of the government for months now, The Hindu has learned.  

Also read |Centralised hiring leads to language, cultural barriers in Eklavya schools

As a result, the National Education Society for Tribal Students (NESTS), set up with the vision of centralising the Eklavya schools, has been left to operate without any mandated authority over the State societies that actually run the day-to-day operations at these schools. In fact, NESTS has uncovered several “financial improprieties” being committed by the societies.

Staff shortage

Ever since the government revised the EMRS scheme in 2020, it has aggressively sanctioned new schools, with a total of 728 Eklavya schools sanctioned till February 28, of which 477 are functional. NESTS administers these schools with a sanctioned strength of just 28 permanent and six temporary staff, most of them retired government servants hired as consultants.

In comparison, there are 661 sanctioned Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas, which are administered by the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti, through its headquarters and eight regional offices which have a combined sanctioned staff strength of 491.  

Questions sent to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs about the status of the centralisation and to what degree it is being pursued have not yet elicited a response. The NESTS offered no comment when The Hindu reached out to the Office of the Commissioner.  

Centralised hiring

The centralisation process was first announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the 2023-24 Union Budget speech, when she said over 38,000 staffers would be hired centrally for the Eklavya schools over the next three years. The first round of recruitment, completed in 2024, saw over 10,000 staffers hired, though officials admitted some “teething problems” with the centralised process and the mandated requirement of Hindi competency.

Many teachers recruited from Hindi-speaking States were posted to southern States, where the language, food, and culture were unfamiliar to them, prompting a series of transfer requests, as reported by The Hindu at the time.  

Pending proposals

With just one year left of the three-year recruitment timeline, the proposal to hire a second batch of over 6,000 staffers has been pending with the Tribal Affairs Ministry for over three months, with queries now being raised now about the centralised process, according to a government official associated with running Eklavya schools when the proposal was being prepared.  

The source added that a proposal to hike the recurring cost per child per year from the ₹1.09 lakh set in 2020, to ₹1.70 lakh – on par with the JNVs – has been waiting for the Department of Expenditure’s nod, despite a nudge from NESTS in November last year. Another proposal to set up at least 10 regional offices under NESTS, sent in December 2024, is also pending.

‘No oversight power’

While the NESTS’ mandate allows it to issue administration guidelines and directions for State societies to follow, sources told The Hindu that without structural overhaul place the regional office operations directly under the NESTS, the body has virtually no power of “oversight, inspections” over the State societies.  

According to internal circulars, the NESTS has uncovered several “financial improprieties” in the operations of State societies. For instance, they often get individual schools to book expenditures incurred by the societies. NESTS also found that the schools are not purchasing daily-use items for students such as uniforms and textbooks as they are meant to do, but are instead transferring the money for this to their parents’ accounts.

One circular from December 2024 even reiterated that State societies are meant to function as regional offices, also warning newly recruited staff against challenging NESTS’ authority. 

Another source said that filling the sanctioned positions at NESTS has become more of a task, explaining that job notices for these positions often receive no applications from within government as “there is no scope for promotion and pay is very low”.