Over 42 per cent of children in the country study in Hindi-medium schools, followed by English (26 per cent) and Bengali (6 per cent). The other two languages most prevalent in Indian classrooms as the medium of instruction are Marathi (5 per cent) and Tamil (2 per cent), according to the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) report released by the Education Ministry on Thursday. The report for 2019-20 shows data of about 26.5 crore children from primary to secondary level enrolled in over 15 lakh schools in India.
Only 69 and 61 students study in Bishnupriya Manipuri and Dogri-medium schools respectively and no one studies in Kashmiri medium, as per the UDISE+ report.
French is the medium of instruction for 1,187 students out of the total, just 669 students are taught in Sindhi.
Unified District Information on School Education (UDISE), initiated in 2012-13 by the Ministry of Education by integrating DISE for elementary education and SEMIS for secondary education, is the main public database on school education in India, covering more than 1.5 million schools, 8.5 million teachers and 250 million children.
UDISE+ is an updated version of UDISE.
A total of 26.45 crore students were enrolled in school education from pre-primary to higher secondary in 2019-20, up by 42.3 lakhs compared to 2018-19, the report has noted. The enrolment of girls increased at all levels of school education in 2019-20 compared to 2018-19. The increase was highest in the pre-primary level.
The number of teachers in school education increased by 2.72 per cent in 2019-20 compared to 2018-19.
In 2019-20, 96.87 lakh teachers were engaged in school education, about 2.57 lakhs higher compared to the statistics in 2018-19.
The report has pointed out that the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) at all levels of school education had improved in 2019-20 compared to 2018-19.