Central government has sanctioned a plan for setting up of five more Ekalavya Model Residential School (EMRS) in Odisha this year at a cost of around Rs 50 crore.
Announcing this, Union Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram today said the state government would select the sites and arrange the required land for the EMRS.
EMRS are set up to provide quality middle and high level education to Scheduled Tribe students in remote areas.
The minister said the EMRS would help in imparting quality education to the tribal students and enable them to compete effectively for higher education programmes like medical and engineering.
Odisha now has 13 EMRS spread over nine districts. While three EMRS are there in Sundargarh district, Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Nabarangapur, Koraput, Rayagada, Gajapati, Kandhamal and Jajpur districts have one each, officials said.
Oram was here to inaugurate a resource centre on mother tongue based multi-lingual early childhood education, developed by an NGO at Mandiapalli near here.
Oram said his ministry has decided to modernise Bhubaneswar-based Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes Research and Training Institute.
UNESCO has identified the tribal museum of the institute as a Model Interactive Tribal Museum for further improvement.
“We want further development of the institute to conduct more study on the culture and language of different tribal communities of the state,” he said.
Prasanta Patnaik