Pratham, the non-governmental organisation engaged in education, has come out with its fourth Annual Status of Education Report (Aser) for rural India. The results are as interesting as in previous years: there is a steady increase in school enrolment and attendance, but not much (if any) improvement in the level of education attained. Drop-out levels remain high, and the majority of students in Class V are unable to do the work that they should have mastered three classes earlier. These are decidedly mixed results when there has been massive recruitment of teachers, and more money spent under a variety of schemes, including the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan for building the physical infrastructure for schools.
The survey confirms the continuation of the trend towards private schools accounting for more enrolment than before (22.5 per cent in the latest survey, up from 16.4 per cent three years earlier). This should not be a surprise, because Aser finds that private schools do a significantly better job than state schools. Despite this trend, the over-all level of educational attainment across the country remains unchanged, when judged by the standard Aser test of whether a student in Class V can undertake a reading or arithmetic test that should be done by a student in Class II. An earlier survey had highlighted a clear bias towards wanting to learn English, as the aspirational language as well as the language of the job market. Both trends run counter to the thrust of state government policy, which is to discourage private providers of education and also to focus on education in the mother-tongue. However, in recognition of societal trends, states like West Bengal and Gujarat have started re-introducing public school education in English.
The most encouraging finding of the survey is that states that have so far been considered backward when it comes to literacy and providing education have started on a course of rapid improvement. Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh have done very well on many parameters, as has Bihar-unlike Uttar Pradesh, which remains a laggard. Gujarat too shows up poorly, although its chief minister, Narendra Modi, makes special mention of how much he has improved the education attainment of girl children in his state. The big shock however is that Kerala, for long the poster boy when it came to mass literacy and education, has now been overtaken by Madhya Pradesh on key parameters. Tamil Nadu too does not show up well.
The broad lesson to be drawn from a survey that seems to throw up contradictory findings (but which remains credible, regardless, because of the sheer scale of the sampling—3 lakh households and 7 lakh children) is that education attainment needs to match the significant improvements in school enrolment. This is not easy in an environment dominated by teachers who are government employees and who can be neither rewarded for good performance nor punished for non-performance. However, to the extent that many state governments are experimenting with different solutions (teachers hired on contract, at substantially lower salaries, are the new norm in many states), and since an annual survey helps generate a sense of competition among the states to do better than the others, there is hope that the picture will improve before long. This is a vital issue because, if India is to benefit from the “demographic dividend” of a larger percentage of the population entering the workforce in the coming quarter century, it has to be ensured that those new workers are properly educated so that they can be fully productive. If not, the country will have lost a once-for-all opportunity at the time of its key demographic transition.