Tripura Education Minister Ratan Lal Nath on Friday (July 8) said that 8,850 students aged between 6-14 years dropped out of their schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A door-to-door survey will be conducted soon to find out if there are any more school drop-out students, the minister said adding that they have decided to restart the ‘Vidyalaya Chalo Abhiyan’ (let’s go to school) to convince the dropout students to join school again.

Apart from Anganwadi and ASHA workers, final-year college students will also be involved as surveyors, the minister said.

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If the students could identify and convince them to get readmission in schools, they will be given remuneration of ₹500 for each admission. If teachers are involved in the survey, they would be getting ₹200 for each admission, he said.

“We have decided to adopt a new scheme, ‘Earn while Learning’, for final-year college students,” the minister added.

The state has also decided to provide free school bags to over 1.51 lakh pre-primary to Class 3 students with a budget of ₹7.58 crore

Currently, the state is providing free books to Class 1 to 8 students and school uniforms for girls and Scheduled Tribe (ST), Scheduled Caste (SC) and Below Poverty Line (BPL) students of the same classes.