New panel to study Plus One seat shortage in Keralam

Representational image.

A new committee will study the shortage of Plus One higher secondary seats in Keralam, Minister for General Education N. Samsudheen has said.

The committee will examine Plus One seat shortage in each education district and address the issue at the education level itself, the Minister said at a press conference recently. The panel, he said, would give its recommendations ahead of the Plus One admission process next year.

The previous Left Democratic Front (LDF) government too had in 2023 appointed a committee to study higher secondary batch reorganisation. The committee led by former higher secondary director V. Karthikeyan Nair submitted its report in 2024. Its recommendations included fixing the maximum number of students in a class at 50 and sanctioning of around 200 new batches to solve the seat shortage in the Malabar region. However, the LDF government neither acted on the findings of the report nor made it public.

Mr. Samsudheen said it was a fact that there was shortage of Plus One seats in Malabar region, with the maximum shortage of around 20,000 seats in Malappuram, followed by Palakkad, Kozhikode and Kasaragod districts, as per General Education department figures.

In other Malabar districts, there was shortage in some regions, such as urban areas of Kannur and Wayanad. At the same time, some seats in interior areas in these districts were vacant, he said.

Mr. Samsudheen also indicated that vacant seats that existed in parts of various districts could not be taken back as it could lead to local-level issues.

Besides marginal increase, the United Democratic Front (UDF) government had sanctioned a total of 120 additional temporary batches in Malabar this year on the basis of an analysis after the main phase of admissions was completed this year, he said.

Most of the vacant seats, the Minister said, were in the unaided sector. These could not be conflated with government and aided sectors, as many children were reluctant to take admission to unaided schools owing to the high fee there.

Significantly, the Karthikeyan Nair committee had recommended that 50-odd batches with 20-25 students each in higher secondary schools in districts such as Thiruvananthapuram, Kottayam, Pathanamthitta, and Alappuzha be shifted to Malappuram.