Student Flow at Primary Level - DISE

32 Student Flow at Primary Levelyear 2005-06 are considered. This is supposed to give slightly a lowerpromotion and high drop-out rate because it also considers those childrenwho successfully completed primary level but did not transit to GradeVI. It is better to consider the number of successful primary graduates butthe same for the year ‘t+1’, i.e. year 2005-06, is not available throughthe DISE data set. DISE collects information on number of graduates eachyear but of the previous academic year which in the present case is theyear 2004-05.One of the major limitations of the DISE enrolment data (in terms ofnumber of schools covered over time) is its inconsistency which is largelybecause of the coverage which has got expanded over a period of time. Ashas already been mentioned that over a period of time, the number ofschools covered under DISE increased many-fold. This means that eachyear new schools were covered under DISE the number of which variedfrom year to year and also from state to state. This is also true that a fewschools covered in a year couldn’t be covered in the subsequent yearbecause of one or the other reason. Therefore, in the present exercise,grade-specific flow rates, such as promotion, drop-out and repetition, aswell as averages of these rates are calculated based upon the gradespecificenrolment and repeaters data of common schools only. Commonschools are the schools which have been covered both in the years 2004-05 and 2005-06 and have also submitted the enrolment and repeatersdata during these years. The number of common schools and percentageof such schools for the years 2004-05 and 2005-06 are presented in Table12 which suggests that more than 88 percent of the total schools in 2005-06 are common compared to 83 percent during the previous year, i.e.2004-05. But in a few states, such as Delhi, Punjab and Sikkim, thepercentage of common schools is much lower than the average of alldistricts which indirectly suggests that these states have re-initialisedschools and have given school identification codes afresh. Needless tomention that once the school identification code is given, it is supposedto remain the same forever. Therefore, the flow rates in case of thesestates do not represent the entire state for the reason mentioned above.This also suggest that about 9 out of 10 schools imparting elementaryeducation covered under DISE are considered in calculating flow rates.This otherwise means that as many as 914.8 thousand schools areconsidered in the calculation which is a very large sample of the totalelementary schools, and therefore, the findings can easily be generalised.On the other hand, as many as 22 out of 29 states reported percentage ofcommon schools in 2005-06 above 80 percent. The percentage of suchschools is as high as 99.57 percent in Tripura and 98.26 percent in Himachal