Abstract:
Within the domain of school education, primary education is a special category as it
lays the foundation of the skill and knowledge-based development of human being.
Government at local and state level is constitutionally obliged to provide education
infrastructure. Government has an important role in urban areas as it has wide range
socio-economic disparity. Government schools in urban areas are lacking in adequate
provision of school infrastructure, effective policies and firm school administration
system. The issue today is not the lack of demand, but rather quality of supply. Urban
deprived children are not being in government primary schools, not because of the
financial or any social problem but due to of shortcomings in schools systems.
This thesis aims to identify factors impacting preference of parents/guardians for
government primary in Bhopal and analyze the spatial variations of those factors.
Bhopal has been selected as study area because here government is spending crores
of rupees in primary education but increase in enrollment is seen high in case of
private primary schools. So there is need to identify the factors which are affecting the
preference of parents and guardians towards sending their children to government
primary schools.
To understand the preference of parents/ guardians is one of the tricky part. In this
study a methodology has been adopted to identify the factors. It includes pilot study
in randomly selected schools for identifying all possible factors impacting the image
of government primary schools among parents and guardians. Then selection of
schools for detailed questionnaire survey in which importance level of each factor is
measured as per schools catchment users. This will result in finding out the most
priority factors as per the parents/ guardians from analysis of detailed questionnaire
survey. Factors are then analyzed at city level and school (local) level.
Recommendations and suggestions are given on both at city and local level. This will
help in improving the image of government primary schools from the perspective of
parent/ guardians. The findings and recommendations if implemented will lead to
increase in enrollment of government primary schools.
