Even as the state government has made it compulsory for schools to teach Gujarati, the number of Gujarati medium schools run by the civic body's school board has seen a reduction by 20 per cent in the last five years. In 2014-15, the number of Gujarati medium schools run by the civic body stood at 303, which has reduced to 243 in 2018-19.
While there has been a reduction in other language medium schools as well, there has been a rise in English medium schools, from nine in 2014-15 to 13 in 2018-19.
"Year by year, the AMC school board is decreasing the number of schools. This year, 98 schools have been shut down and in the last calendar year, 78 schools were closed. This is a huge loss for the underprivileged and marginalised section of society's basic right to education," said Iliyas Qureshi, member of AMC school board.
Providing more details about language-wise mediums, Qureshi said, "There has been a decrease even in the other language medium schools. For example, there used to be a Sindhi-medium school which has been now shut down. Marathi medium schools dropped down from 12 to 8, Urdu medium from 63 to 49, while Tamil medium went down from three to two schools."
According to him, there are also issues with the quality of teaching. "Most of the time, the teachers are out of school for other activities and the school kids are also roped in for different awareness programmes, with the classrooms remaining vacant," remarked Qureshi.
Ramesh Tanna, an activist, termed the matter extremely grave and said that now, the state government has to actively intervene to save not only Gujarati language but also convince parents that their children will be groomed best if taught in their mother tongue.
"It seems as if we are performing the last rites of teaching in the mother tongue. The data reveals the sorry state of education in AMC-run schools, which was not the case earlier and several experts and doctors had completed their primary education in their mother tongue," said Tanna, who is also secretary of the Global Gujarati Federation. Tanna also blamed the privatisation of education as a major reason for the trend towards private and English medium schools.
When Lagdhir Desai, school board administrator of AMC, was contacted, he said there has been no shut down. "There is no shut down of any school. In fact, we have merged the schools which were running on the same campus. This will ease the economic and administrative burden on us and we would be able to better monitor them," said Desai.
