Parental Incarceration and Children's School Drop-out-A Limited Study for West Bengal

Dropout from school poses the greatest challenge towards achieving the desired educational policy of government despite codified legislations and state-sponsored projects that aim to bring the students within the arena of school set-up. Various researchers have addressed this issue from various perspectives corroborating their viewpoint by various governmental and independent organizational reports. All these clearly show the vastness and complexity of school dropout resulting from varied socio-economic factors as well as lacunae of policy and infrastructure. In addition to the determinants of school dropouts in India which can be found in the 75th round of NSS data, whereby it is found that 74\% of student population aged 18 years and above drop out from school before reaching the 12th standard inclusive of various religious, economic and caste-based groups, the students with incarcerated parents form another determinant of school dropouts. The present study will try to build a bridge between the indicator termed as “Incarcerated Parents” and its effect on school dropout, and find possible ways to speed up justice delivery for parents and children. This is a limited study as it is solely based on secondary data which is scarce for the chosen state. Whether incarcerated parents form the population of convicted or under-trial or detenue within prisons is inconsequential for this study, as in all the cases the school-going children of incarcerated people face enormous lack of social and emotional stability, parental care and quality peer-company, and are altogether deprived of their human rights.