Meticulous planning, increased motivation and the injection of Rs 40 crore per district by the World Bank has upped the enrolment level in Zilla Parishad schools to 100 per cent, raised attendence to 93 per cent and cut the dropout rate from about 50 per cent to 18 per cent.

However, the greatest challenge to the programme, which concludes in 2001, is taking primary education to migratory populations, which by their very nature makes them elusive. Sugarcane cutters typify this problem. The Indian Express finds out why.

``My mother has saved enough from my earnings last year to buy me a new school bag,'' smiles Jyoti Shankar Rathod, trying to convince her teacher that she will not drop out from school like she did last year foralmost three months. During that time, the nine-year-old from Kapuswadi village in Paithan taluka toiled in the fields from dawn to dusk, spraying fertilisers, weeding out grass and plucking cotton bolls that fetched a precious Rs 10 per kg.

But though little Jyoti can finally afford a school bag there will be no schooling for her, confides Sangham Jadhav at the Kapuswadi Zilla Parishad school that covers 200 households in the taluka. While the school is going nowhere, Jyoti and her family will soon move to the sugarcane-rich districts in western Maharashtra, where her father has signed a Rs 9,000 contract for the season. They, along with hundreds of others, will be shunted between factories there till the harvest season ends.

Jyoti's education must wait. Her parents are not in the least bit concerned that the child could not take her examinations last year and will have to repeat Std III that is, if she ever returns to school. And by the time she grows up, education will have dropped out of her parentsagenda forever.

Like Jyoti, more than 10 per cent of the total 18 per cent of girls who drop out at the Std V level are from migratory populations, the biggest impediment to the DPEP, which aims to cut the overall dropout rate in Aurangabad district to less than 10 per cent by 2001. Migratory populations, teachers admit, are the biggest challenge to the programme, whose gains otherwise have been extremely encouraging.

Migration itself is determined by various socio-economic reasons. From seeking employment as farm labourers to displacement due to irrigation projects, social conflicts betwen various groups of people also result in sections of the population shifting away from the main village. Construction sites also attract a large number of people from nearby villages.

Says Laxmikant Pandey, education officer with the Aurangabad Zilla Parishad: ``At a time when proposals (103) for even large populations are still pending, it is extremely difficult for us to cater to small, migrating populations.''These proposals have been pending despite the DPEP's contribution of 154 new schools built over the last four years. For instance, some of them cater to a miniscule 30 houses.

The concept of non-formal education too has failed to bring the desired results. While the orginal project plan for the DPEP envisaged the creation of over 1,200 such schools all over the eight talukas in the district, only 200-odd have been built till date. In fact, the last 100 were opened in the last year alone, despite the fact that the DPEP's term will end in 2001.

Pleas to sugar barons to open non-formal schools for their labourers have consistently been ignored. ``A lot of people come with huge registers and inquire into every minute detail about us, while we work on the sugarcane fields, but none take our children to school,'' remarks Gamaji Pawar, a farm labourer who worked in Ahmednagar district last year.

``But the nature of the sugarcane cutters' work is such that they rarely stay in one place for more than a week.They keep rotating the labourers, who have no option but to take their children with them, Pandey explains. ``Unless there are elders looking after the children, there is no hope of any education for these children irrespective of the incentives the government offers,'' he explains.

Adds Deputy Education Officer, S S Deshmukh: ``We are tying our best bring down the overall dropout rate to 10 per cent by 2001. But we should realise that the Education Department alone cannot do this. Development has to take place on every front to make itself meaningful.''