Raising learning outcomes in backward areas linked to improving governance

KEF is working with the state and district officials to resolve many archaic, pre-colonial rules and procedures

The year 2020 may have been many things to many people, but for Aditya Natraj, head of Kaivalya Education Foundation (KEF), it has been, above all, an eye-opener.

But this story begins a bit earlier. Till April 2018, KEF, a foundation financed by the Piramal Group, was trying to fix India’s unwieldy and crumbling government education system by focussing on the school leader. Its work in a few backward districts of Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Gujarat resulted in improvements in their functioning. Working in 1200 schools across 10 locations, it saw a nearly 20 per cent improvement in foundational skills for grades 3-5.

Towards April-May 2018, KEF decided to shift focus beyond its comfort zone and began working in 25 of the most backward but aspirational districts in the country. It launched programmes in the backwards districts of Assam, Jharkhand, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Orissa.

But within a few months, it became evident that the foundation faced an uphill task. To begin with, the new districts were difficult areas to work in — disproportionately minorities ridden, disproportionately tribal and disproportionately geographically disadvantaged.

“After being here for six to nine months, we realised that this is not just an academic problem; it’s a social, geographic, economic, political and academic problem. If everything else is solved, we can solve the learning problem,” explains Natraj, a former consultant who moved to the development sector many years ago.

This is a realisation that more and more NGOs and civil society bodies working in the education space are coming to — that education cannot be fixed unless governance is fixed.

Digital Learning Community Classes for children of low resource households in Thane, Mumbai.

Ashish Dhawan, founder of Central Square Foundation, another NGO working to improve India’s school learning, is launching the Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States in partnership with economist Karthik Muralidharan to tackle precisely this issue. Samagra is yet another outfit working in the same space. With KEF’s recent pivot, these are three large NGOs foraying into the prickly governance space.

Operationally too, the new regions KEF picked have not been a cakewalk for its workers. The NGO hires young Gandhi fellows (the Gandhi Fellowship programme is another initiative from the Piramal Group) - currently 450 are on board - to get a practical understanding of the theoretical problems they study in textbooks.

“When you are in Buxa in West Bengal or Darbhanga in Bihar or in the coal mafia infested regions of Jharkhand and are unable to get done anything you set out to do, you understand India’s structural inequalities and the failure of governance,” says Natraj.
 

But in KEF’s new geographies, even the basics were hard to come by as inward migration is unheard of. Renting a place was a challenge since the locals could not quite fathom why an educated person would want to come and live there since all of them are trying to get out.

Community Classes for girl children by female volunteers in Kalahandi, Odisha to build back equitable education post COVID-19.

Moreover, these regions are not for the faint-hearted. Apart from death threats and violence, if a fellow falls ill, qualified doctors are often miles away. Illnesses are common as water and food are often not of the quality that the fellows are accustomed to.

But above all this, the team realised unless one worked to change a whole bunch of factors that act in unison, there would be no improvement in learning outcomes. And school heads, too, would achieve very little, even if trained and motivated.

That’s when KEF decided to go all out with its effort and deployed most of its total strength of 1100 staffers into these areas. It decided to work on a three-pronged strategy: mobilising and changing community mindset, fixing governance wherever feasible and starting a ‘Girls for Girls’ programme where local girl volunteers who have broken through the patriarchal system help their peers do the same.

The organisation was able to work with school leaders and help them motivate teachers to improve functioning. However, the students needed to be there to begin with. “The practice of sending children, especially girls, to school beyond a certain age simply doesn’t exist,” explains Natraj. In these regions, girls dropped out after Class 5; in KEF’s earlier areas of operation, they dropped out later — usually by Class 8 or 10.

In its ‘Girls for Girls’ programme, local girls are pulled in to help their peers resist patriarchy and finish their studies. A total of 1,50,000 girls are being mentored and guided by around 12,000 girl volunteers in the districts where they operate.

Rally to increase enrollment of girl children in Govt. schools of Sitamarhi, Bihar

The foundation’s teams also jumped in to change mindsets by starting a series of campaigns involving local youth icons, popular sports persons, progressive religious leaders, the media and anyone who could have a positive social influence. From organising football games where players wore T-shirts that promote education for girls to organising street plays, music shows, melas, and other local events to break established mindsets, the idea was to help parents understand the value of education beyond Class 5 — the stage at which many tribal and other communities pull out their girls from schools.

Another huge area of gap that KEF encountered was the almost total lack of governance and the apathy of the system. There were processes that didn’t work, no criteria for selection of officials at any level, appointments made on seniority rather than skills or merit, no grievance redressal mechanisms and so on.

For example, in Jharkhand, the KEF team found that of the 1,20,000 government school teachers in the state, 36,000 had filed a legal case against the state or the principal secretary. “In a situation where the primary frontline worker is locked in litigation, you can imagine how demotivated he or she is to carry out their regular duties,” says Natraj.

KEF’s team of lawyers have now managed to bring down the caseload from 15,000 to 6,000 over the last many months.

Similarly, while the processes for teachers to seek leave or medical reimbursement do exist, they mostly fail to work. Medical reimbursements can take anything between 12 and 15 months. Selection of staff, too, is completely ad hoc. No criteria are laid down on what tasks an appointee is expected to perform or how to select the right candidate. KEF is working with the state and district officials to resolve many of these archaic, pre-colonial rules and procedures.

The KEF team has hit the ground running, but no matter what it does, it is keenly conscious of its inadequacies. Natraj says that for India’s education conundrum to be fixed, there are over two dozen non-education related issues that need to be resolved at the state and district level before any dent can be made in learning. In his opinion,  all the NGOs in the country put together won’t amount to more than a tiny fraction of what each backward state needs. The sheer size of the elephant in the room is daunting.