The education system in India: promises to keep

ABSTRACT

India’s performance in education presents a conundrum that is not easily explained. While it has expanded access to most parts of the country, and established world class institutions of higher education, it still has among the highest number of out of school children and a very poor record of school learning levels. In particular, the persistent and growing inequities in access and quality of basic education call into question the strategies and approach adopted. While many explanations have been proffered, in this article I take a close look at the government’s system of school education delivery.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• education
• Right to Education Act (RTE)
• school exclusion rates
• marginalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There were a mere 2.1 lakh primary schools, 13,600 middle schools and 7416 higher secondary schools across the country at the time of independence (Census of India, 1951, 2011).

2. From, Sadgopal (2019). Nai Taleem: Gandhi’s Challenge to Hegemony, in Social Scientist vol. 47. No. 5/6.

3. It was originally placed in the ‘state’ list, but through an amendment in the Constitution, in 1976 it was added to the ‘concurrent’ list enabling a role for the Central government in its governance.

4. Government of India, Ministry of Education: http://mdm.nic.in/mdm_website/

5. A ‘society’ is an entity set up under the Societies Registration Act, for the purpose of benefit to society. While it must be registered by the government it is technically not a part of the State.

6. A separate system for providing academic support was deemed necessary in order to that the department of education may focus on administrative matters.

7. Administratively, a district in India, is divided into smaller units called blocks. For the education purposes, in particular the SSA, blocks have been further divided into clusters.

8. DISE, that collected data on elementary education when it started, has extended its brief to secondary education as well and is now called Unified DISE or U-DISE.

9. See, also, Malik (2020) Indian Public schools failed to provide education during lockdown, Scroll [https://scroll.in/article/973138/indian-public-schools-failed-to-provide-education-during-lockdown-say-80-parents-in-a-new-survey]

10. The ASER Centre, has been bringing out the Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER), based on testing children on basic literacy and numeracy, since 2005. The tests are conducted by ASER volunteers in the home environment of children largely in rural areas. They cover a sample of both public and private school-going children. These reports have become a kind of bench-mark of learning levels in Indian schools and an important element of the quality-as-learning-outcome paradigm that has emerged.

11. According to NSSO data [75^th round, 2017–18] the per child expenditure in private unaided schools is more than 6 times higher than in government schools.

12. The RTE Act mandates private unaided schools to take 25% of their incoming class from socially and economically backward families. Barring this requirement private schools get to choose the children they admit.

13. See SLP 14124/2012 and SLP 14125/2012 in the Supreme Court.

14. The states studies were Rajasthan, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Delhi

15. The schedule of the RTE Act lays out the minimum requirements mandated in the Act. https://legislative.gov.in/sites/default/files/The%20Right%20of%20Children%20to%20Free%20and%20Compulsory%20Education%20Act,%202009.pdf

16. See, Bhatty et al. (2017), ‘Out-of-school Children in India: Some insights into what we know and what we don’t’ EPW 9 December 2017, Vol 52. Issue 49.

17. For a critique from the economists’ perspectives, see Alan Blinder (1987), The Rules versus Discretion Debate in the Light of Recent Experience’, Paper presented at the Kiel Conference of June 1987, ‘Macro and Micro Policies for More Growth and Employment’.