Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan is a major scheme launched in March, 2009 with the vision of making secondary education of good quality available, accessible and affordable to all young persons in the age group 15-16 years.
The objective of the scheme is to enhance access and improve quality of education at secondary stage, while ensuring equity. The scheme envisages enhancing the enrollment for classes IX-X by providing a secondary school within a reasonable distance of every habitation, improving quality of education imparted at secondary level through making all secondary schools conform to prescribed norms, removal of gender, socio-economic and disability barriers, universal access to secondary level education by 2017, and universal retention by 2020.
The Centrally Sponsored Schemes viz ICT at schools, Girls’ Hostel, Inclusive Education for Disabled at Secondary Stage and Vocational Education were subsumed from 2013-14 under the RMSA. The subsuming of these schemes under the RMSA, would lead to significant financial savings and administrative rationalization of the provisions under the schemes which, on the one hand would add to the fund availability under RMSA and on the other hand, since interventions under these schemes extend to aided schools as also cover the segment of higher secondary, their subsuming under RMSA will in effect provide for convergence based implementation of RMSA with the inclusion of aided schools and higher secondary segment. These are now integrated component of RMSA
Though the benefits to aided schools as of now will be limited to the current interventions under the other schemes and to the exclusion of the core components of the existing RMSA provisions, at the State level the convergence would lead to integrated and inclusive (aided schools and higher secondary classes) planning and implementation.