Problem / Objective:

One of the major challenges faced by the state of Andhra Pradesh is the high dropout rate of students. To transform the state into becoming a technology hub, it was necessary to minimize the school dropouts and increase the employability of the youth. 

The state has 2,800 government schools and approximately two lakh students enrolled in them. In the year 2017, the state only had the Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) as 84.48% in primary schools which is far below the national average of 99.21%. Nearly one lakh students were believed to be school dropouts. 

A study was conducted through APGER (a mobile application deployed by the government of Andhra Pradesh) for calculating the number of students out of schools, and it was found that 99,833 children were out of schools.

Solution / Approach:

In December 2015, the Andhra Pradesh Government signed a memorandum of understanding with Microsoft to use AI technology for addressing this issue. By using Microsoft's Azure machine learning platform, an application was developed, which helped the state education department in predicting school dropouts. 

The application processes complex data sets that included details about enrollment, student performance, gender, socio-economic demographics, school infrastructure and teacher's skills to find predictive patterns. The application proactively identified the potential dropouts and gave an analysis of the critical factors responsible for the issue. More than 60 patterns were identified, which helped in tracking dropouts.

Impact / Implementation:

For the academic year 2018-2019, the platform identified 19,500 probable dropouts from the Vishakhapatnam district. The key factors for these dropouts were insufficient furniture and inadequate toilet infrastructure. Other influencing factors identified through the application were: learning outcomes (57%), infrastructure (31%), transition (7%), age inappropriateness (4%) and social category (1%).

This led to the tracking, counselling, and addressing the issues of the students who are likely to drop out. On behalf of the analysis, the government decided to initiate drives to increase enrollment at government schools by raising awareness about the advantages of public school to students as well as their parents.

Currently, the government is using Vidyarthi Nestham mobile application which systematically allows 4 to 5 predicted school dropouts per teacher in each school. The teachers then begin mentoring their students after understanding the reason for their dropping out provided on the application. 

The app is already being used successfully by more than 10,000 schools in Andhra Pradesh, empowering more students to finish their education and graduate as employable new workers who will help grow the economy. The government has now expanded the project to all 13 districts, covering more than 5 million students across all classes.