RTE effect? Girls are finally catching up with boys in school attendance

Eight years after implementation of RTE, girls are finally catching up with boys in schooling; most big states reduce regional variations in 'children with no education'

Girls are catching up with boys in terms of attending school over the last decade, with improvements in the years of schooling and proportion of uneducated children. The regional variation among states in ensuring that no child remains uneducated has declined, while that in ensuring they attend college has increased.

These are among the findings in a report by the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) for 2015-16.

The median years of schooling for girls underwent a faster change from 1.9 years in 2005-06 to 4.4 years in 2015-16, while that for boys went up from 4.9 years to 6.9 years in the same period. The proportion of girls with no schooling declined from 42 per cent to 22 per cent, and that of boys from 31 per cent to 15 per cent in the decade.

The narrowing of the gender gap is being reflected eight years after the implementation of Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009, though the process started much before, according to Suman Bhattacharjea, director at ASER Centre. “Though the gender gap has reduced in enrolment, there is no concrete evidence that the gender gap in school attendance has reduced,” she added.

States are converging towards a lower proportion of uneducated but are diverging in terms of access to education at and above the degree level. Most big and populous states reduced regional variation among themselves in ‘children with no education’. In terms of college education, the inequality of educational attainment among states increased during the decade.
Again states’ performance in basic education differs from that in higher education.  Maharashtra ranks third best in basic education coverage but sixth best in the proportion of children entering degree education.

From 85 per cent in 2005-06, the proportion of men who are currently employed—regular employees and those who have worked in the last seven days of the survey—came down to 75 per cent in 2015-16. For women, the proportion  declined from 36 per cent to 24 per cent.

“As the NFHS is a community-based random survey, its data differs from employment surveys by the Labour Bureau. The latter surveys companies and not households. The NFHS is more representative in that respect,” said SK Singh, professor at the Indian Institute of Population Sciences, the organisation that prepared the NFHS.

Further, the proportion of unemployed persons was more in the well-educated cohort (eight+ years) for both men and women than in the less educated (less than eight years) cohort consistently for
2005-06 and 2015-16.

Employment shares this inverse correlation not just with education, but also with wealth. While women from 60 per cent of the households from the poorest quintile were unemployed in the 12 months preceding the survey, 80 per cent of women from the richest quintile households were unemployed.

Among men, 13 per cent from the poorest quintile households were unemployed while the proportion was 25 per cent from the richest quintile.

In a first, India has less than 50 per cent women marrying after completing 18 years of age—the legal age—with the median age for women at the time of first marriage improving from 17.2 years to 19 years. But, the median age of marriage for uneducated women is 17.2 years, same as the average in 2006, compared to 22.7 years for college-educated women.

The reduction in the fertility rate among Indian women from 2.7 in 2005-06 to 2.2 in 2015-16 is associated with an intrinsic inequality. Rural women tend to have 2.4 children per woman, while urban women tend to have 1.8.

Among wealth quintiles, the poorest quintile has a fertility rate of 3.2 children per woman, while women in the richest quintile give birth to 1.5 children on average, suggesting clearly that wealthy households in India are increasingly preferring a single child.

In all, 23 states and Union Territories have a fertility rate lower than the population replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.