An Evaluation of Growth and Trends of Enrollment and Drop-Outs in Elementary Schools of Karnataka

Education is recognized as a fundamental human right, along with other necessities, such as food, shelter and water in The Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948). The education empowers people to make informed choices about their lives and about their rights as citizens in a democracy. The main intension of the paper is, to examine the growth and trend of enrollments and drop-outs in elementary Schools of Karnataka. This paper has been used exponential growth model to calculate the growth and trends in enrollment and drop-outs of elementary schools by using available secondary data. The paper has been concluded that, the participation of private management schools is very dominant in terms of its enrollment compared to Govt schools in both rural as well as urban areas. Whereas in caste-wise enrollments, the growth of enrollment in SC category is very impressive compared to ST's. Even though there is lot many programmes have been implementing to reduce the drop-outs but the problem is still existed but now, the drop-outs in elementary schools is declining gradually from the last decade.