Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi at the news meet in Guwahati on Saturday. Picture by Eastern Projections

Guwahati, May 30: Dispur today announced ranking of schools on the basis of performance for extending governmental assistance to sustain and build on the rising pass percentage of matric and Plus Two results over the past few years despite the odds afflicting Assam.

The decision aims at maintaining the success rate of students in this year’s tests.

Happy over the students’ overall performance despite insurgency and bandhs, Gogoi today said the results reflected a change in the mindset of the people.

The slew of initiatives announced by Gogoi this afternoon to improve the academic infrastructure include setting up of two advisory councils. One will look after degree, technical and professional courses and the other will be for students till Class XII.

A cell within the education department will be set up to take care of schools in the rural belts and another for schools catering to the poor and the disadvantaged sections in urban areas.

The details of the measures are yet to be finalised but the government will go all out to link education with employment generation.

The pass percentage in the Matric exam has risen from 55.54 in 2005 to 62.39 this year. It was 33.27 in 2001, the year the Congress regained power in the state. The pass percentage in Higher Secondary examinations has gone up from 61.5 in 2007 to 67.99 in the arts stream, from 67.14 to 72.11 in commerce and from 68.44 to 80.23 in the science stream.

Admitting that despite the good results, there were areas to improve upon vis-à-vis performance of the government schools, Gogoi said: “We will go for categorisation of schools and rank them A, B and C. The performing schools will get more additional support and incentives from the government. This will help build competition.

“We have decided to give more funds to rural schools and those in the urban areas catering mostly to the disadvantaged sections so that they can better their performance. If need be, we might even help a performing private school that caters to the poor and the middle class.”

The other steps include extending support to top private, technical and professional institutes in lieu of around 30 per cent seats reserved for students who do not make it to the top notch institutions despite qualifying for the tests and those who cannot afford capitation fees.