Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has launched the distribution of Jagananna Vidya Kanuka kits worth Rs 1,042.53 crore under the scheme that would benefit 43,10,165 students of Classes I to X in government and government-aided schools.
This is the fourth consecutive year that the is distributing the kits to deserving students. Each kit costs Rs 2,400.
The distribution of kits was taken up all over the state in the presence of ministers, MLAs, MLCs, MPs and other public representatives in a festive Atmosphere.
The CM said that this time, the government has come up with better-quality material in the kits, based on the feedback it received from the stakeholders. He listed out the material contained in each kit, like three pairs of uniform dress, a school bag, bilingual textbooks, notebooks, workbooks, a pair of school shoes, two pairs of socks, a belt, an English to Telugu dictionary and a school bag of larger size.
The Chief Minister announced that the AP government has signed an MoU with the Educational Testing Service to train students from Classes three to nine, to improve their skills and appear for TOEFL. This apart, under this programme, select groups of English teachers would be made to attend orientation courses in the US from the current academic year.
The CM promised efforts to link Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine Learning, data analysis, language learning module and Chat GPT with the Education system in the state so that students could get an exposure to the international education system.
To promote higher education, the government is providing fee-reimbursement to the students with no cap on the number of beneficiaries in each family. So far, a sum of Rs 10,636 crore was spent on this. Under the Vasanthi Deevena, the government spent Rs 4,275 crore so far, he said.
The CM said that the government was providing financial assistance upto Rs 1.25 crore each for students to pursue professional education in top universities around the world, under the Jagananna Videshi Deevana. The government had spent Rs 60,329 crore on the Education sector in the last four years in AP, he said.