Survey launched to assess number of students leaving state after Class XII

Kolkata: The Education department is conducting a survey to assess the number of students who have studied in state boards upto Class XII and are moving out of Bengal for higher studies.

“We have asked the state boards to undertake a survey so that we can have an idea of how many students are leaving the state for higher studies after class XII. We will furnish the data in our Bangla Siksha portal once the exercise is complete,” said state Education minister Bratya Basu in reply to a query from BJP legislator Sankar Ghosh in the state assembly.

The students studying in Science stream are among the most who travel to other states after class XII. As per Education department data, students who had studied in Science stream in the year 2021, 2022 and 2023 are 116511, 107566 and 81692.

In the XII standard, the total number of students were 83338, 89671 and 113606 in the year 2021, 2022 and 2023 respectively. The minister said that contemporary subjects which will be useful in employment generation like Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, Data Science etc have been introduced in the higher secondary curriculum from this year. Basu said that rather than setting up more colleges and universities, the state government under the instructions of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has laid emphasis on improving the quality of education in the academic institutions.