Get Cracking On Education
Some improvement, but not enough, in primary schools
Bhaskar Dutta
It is a sad commentary on our public life that the Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest honour, has now become embroiled in political controversy. The past recipients of the award have typically been very distinguished public figures, and there has hardly been any controversy surrounding the award. One of the recent recipients, Amartya Sen, was in the news recently — apparently the French president has requested him to advice his government on how to incorporate factors affecting the quality of life in conventional measures of national income. It is not clear whether Sen can give any new advice on this issue since indices such as the Human Development Index, which aggregates levels of achievement in education, health and national income, have been in use for a very long time.
Of course, if fresh advice can help, then Nicolas Sarkozy could not have chosen a better person. Sen has been perhaps the most influential economist supporting the use of indices such as the HDI in evaluations of the standard of living or quality of life, and has been a vocal advocate of increased government expenditure on health and education. Unfortunately, he seems to have had very little impact on government policies in his own country.
The UNDP releases values of HDI for roughly 175 countries. It is depressing to see that year after year, India figures somewhere near the bottom of the ladder. What is worse is that the low level of human development in India is not due simply to the fact that per capita GDP is relatively low. Even if countries were ranked simply in terms of health and education indicators, India would fare rather badly.
Our relative position in education is particularly disappointing. The average reader of the TOI almost certainly believes that India is “more educated” than most countries in Africa and Latin America. This erroneous belief has been fostered or promoted by successive Indian governments, which have all paid lip service to the vital need to improve education and health in the country. In particular, the pivotal role of education has been repeatedly stressed in various official documents. This started with the Indian Constitution which resolved to provide universal free elementary education within a period of 10 years. The National Policy on Education in 1968 and 1986 also stressed the need for total eradication of illiteracy and to provide universal elementary education in the shortest possible time.
But is the overall situation finally changing in India? Over the last couple of years, the wellknown NGO, Pratham, has been conducting
nationwide surveys of elementary education to, in their own words, “take stock of the situation”. Pratham has just released its provisional Annual Status of Educational Report (ASER 2007) for rural India. The survey aims to get reliable estimates of the status of children’s schooling and basic learning in reading and arithmetic. At least some of its findings are very promising.
ASER 2007 confirms that there has been a significant and steady improvement in enrolment amongst children in the 6-14 age group. The percentage of children who are not in school in this age group is now less than five. The central government must be given some credit for this — clearly, programmes like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) have made a difference, with 98 per cent of rural children now having access to primary schools within a radius of one kilometre. The ASER team also finds evidence of improvements in school facilities with better availability of toilets, drinking water, and a significantly greater supply of mid-day meals.
Unfortunately, all aspects of the ASER report are not as cheerful. Learning levels remain a cause for concern. Only 60 per cent of children in class V can read a class II text, while only 40 per cent can do simple divisions. Clearly, a lot of children are going to school but not learning very much. It is not surprising that ASER also finds some evidence that teacher absenteeism has been increasing. Perhaps, the only silver lining is that there has been some improvement in these figures between 2005 and 2007.
Of course, these are aggregate figures for rural India as a whole, and there is a lot of variation across states. Not surprisingly, Kerala — a state that is far ahead of the rest of India in terms of human development — performs remarkably well according to all the learning criteria. It is also almost inevitable that Bihar, UP and Rajasthan would figure at the other end of the scale. However, there are a few pleasant surprises. Perhaps, the biggest of these has been the quite remarkable improvement in both enrolment and learning levels recorded by Madhya Pradesh, which was once classified as a BIMARU state.
Some people would have us believe that the low levels of education in rural India are because rural parents do not understand the value of education. Perhaps one of the biggest contributions of ASER is that it debunks this hypothesis. A significant fraction of rural children actually undertakes private tuition. So, there is no lack of demand for education. This puts the ball squarely in the state’s court. Funding of SSA and similar programmes must increase. But, it is not simply a question of pouring more money into such programmes. We must also ask why some states do significantly better than others.
The writer is professor of economics, Warwick University.
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