To avoid school dropouts and for tracking out-of-school children, the State government has decided to seed the Aadhaar number with the ‘Student Achievement Tracking System (SATS)’ number of all government, aided and private school students.
This decision was taken by the Department of School Education and Literacy officials at a meeting headed by the B.C. Nagesh, Minister of School Education and Literacy recently.
Officials of the department said: “Seeding Aadhaar number with the students’ SATS number will provide accountability and it is easy to monitor out-of-school children and their activities in a proper way.”
Since two years of the COVID pandemic had caused disruptions in the education sector in many ways, as during lockdown, thousands of families migrated to their native places and rural areas from various cities across the State and it led to thousands of school dropouts.
Some students did not get Transfer Certificate (TC), while children of migrant workers from different States were also out of schools, making it difficult to track students.
The survey report, which was submitted to the Karnataka High Court in public interest litigation, revealed that from the age 6 to 14, a total of 15,338 out-of-schoolchildren were there in entire State. A total of 10,018 children, aged between 6 and 14, never enrolled in the schools.
The court also directed the Chief Secretary-led high-level committee to suggest measures to immediately admit these children to schools. All these things lead the government to take the decision to seeding students Aadhaar number with the SATS number from class 1
The Aadhaar numbers of a majority of students who are beneficiaries of midday meals in government and aided schools are already seeded with the SATS number. The remaining students are private management schools. The Department of School Education and Literacy is planning to seed the private school students Aadhaar number with the SATS number.
Mr. Nagesh told The Hindu, “Seeding the Aadhaar number with the SATS number is the only solution to track the out-of-school children and avoid school dropouts and for monitoring them properly.”
