From the coming academic year, two Saturdays a month will be no-bag days and will be celebrated as ‘Sambhrama Shanivara’. Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa on Thursday said the aim was to encourage a “joyful learning” experience.
Many schools are already observing this practice once a month.
Pushing ahead with the agenda of opening new avenues for English education, after opening English-medium sections in 1,000 Kannada-medium schools, the State government has decided to start English-medium sections along with Urdu medium in 400 government Urdu schools from 2020–21. A sum of ₹1 crore will be allocated for this. A sum of ₹100 crore will be provided for infrastructure development of the 276 Karnataka Public Schools that have classes from pre-primary to pre-university course.
Mr. Yediyurappa also announced that under the Karnataka Legislators’ Local Area Development programme, three government schools would be adopted and developed by legislators in their respective constituencies.
In flood-hit areas
With several anganwadis and classrooms being damaged owing to floods, the government has decided to reconstruct 842 anganwadis and 6,469 classrooms of 3,386 government schools.
Teachers will get all the administrative facilities online. For this purpose, a mobile app, ‘Shikshaka Mitra’, will be developed.
Monitoring universities
In the Higher Education Department, Mr. Yediyurappa said a permanent system would be put in place to efficiently monitor the administration of universities and colleges with the help of technology. Interactive online courses have also been proposed.
