Kerala Plus One seat shortage: Govt plans 120 more temporary batches in four Malabar districts

The Kerala government is considering sanctioning an additional 120 temporary batches to address the current shortage of Plus One higher secondary seats in the districts of Palakkad, Malappuram, Kozhikode, and Kasaragod.

Of these, half are likely to be in Malappuram. The proposal is likely to come up in the next Cabinet meeting.

Minister for General Education N. Samsudheen, while replying to questions on steps to ensure adequate Plus One seats by MLAs Sajeev Joseph, K. Jayanth, V.S. Joy, and K.P. Noushadali during the Question Hour in the Assembly on Monday, said district and taluk-level scrutiny had showed that more Plus One seats would be required in these districts.

Malappuram, he said, faced the most acute shortage of Plus One seats. Additional batches would be sanctioned in Malappuram and the other three districts facing seat shortage to address the problem temporarily this year.

Steps would be taken to make the Plus One single-window admission process more effective once the admission for this year was completed by sanctioning permanent batches.

The General Education department wanted all students in an educational district who had completed SSLC to get Plus One seats in the same educational district, he said.

Plus One seats were vacant in some districts and some regions as per State-level figures. Most of these were in the unaided sector. Steps would be taken to remove disparities between regions, particularly in the hilly and backward regions, by sanctioning more seats. Such issues would be ironed out in a couple of years. The need to incorporate new courses in tune with the times would also be explored as also allowing changes in subject combinations, he said.

On crowded classrooms

In response to a query on crowded Plus One classrooms, the Minister said marginal seat increase had been introduced as a temporary measure to accommodate more students seeking Plus One admission. The rearrangement of Plus One batches and seats that the government planned would bring down the teacher-student ratio from 1:65 in government schools and 1:60 in aided schools to 1:50.

Asked about enhancement of students’ knowledge and skill in non-Malayalam languages, including English, and soft-skill development from Plus One onwards, the Minister said schemes for this could be formulated as part of quality enhancement measures.

In response to a query about a study for rearranging Plus One seats and batches, the Minister said the previous Left Democratic Front (LDF) government had appointed a committeed led by V. Karthikeyan Nair to study imbalances in the higher secondary sector but did not take any action on its report.