New Delhi, Jan. 5: A flagship plan to build model schools — exemplars for all other schools — in educationally backward blocks across India is stuck despite ample funds and an eagerness to start the project.

First, because the human resource development (HRD) ministry can’t identify educationally backward blocks (EBBs). Second, because states have re-organised blocks, leaving the government to reckon with 1,000 more blocks than it had planned for.

Third, because the HRD ministry can’t define a “model” school. Two months after the cabinet approved thousands of crores of rupees to fund 2,500 model schools, an experts panel headed by a ministry official is still struggling to define the parameters of a “model” school.

The definition it had used to obtain cabinet clearance, the ministry now realises, was flawed. The panel met on Friday but could not arrive at a consensus. “The schools were to be modelled on the Kendriya Vidyalayas. But standards differ even among the KVs,” an official said.

The UPA had promised 6,000 model schools – on in every block -- under the 11th Plan and allocated Rs 12,750 crore. The first 2,500 were to come up in the most educationally backward blocks.

When the plan was conceived, India had just over 6,000 blocks. But recent delimitation raised the number to 7,000-odd. “We aren’t clear whether we will have to build 7,000 schools or choose 6,000 blocks,” an official said.

The ministry would anyway struggle to identify the blocks where it should set up the first model schools. Apart from the 2,500 approved, another 1,000 are meant for EBBs — blocks where the gross enrolment rate (GER) is lower than the national average. So, the ministry has a total of 3,500 schools to build in EBBs.

Once it finds these blocks.

The last time a detailed block-wise study of GERs was conducted was in the 2001 census. EBBs then totalled 3,074.

Based on sample studies, however, the ministry has in the past used a figure of 3,300 EBBs for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and over 3,400 for the midday meal scheme before these programmes were universalised. “Now we don’t know which of these statistics to use to identify the EBBs,” an official said.