Flagship programme?

The Budget speech has advertised a focus on "flagship programmes" such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). The expenditure on the department of elementary education and literacy is sought to be raised from Rs 12,500 crore to Rs 17,000 crore. It is obviously hoped that spending money will help children learn more. But this has not yet been demonstrated. SSA, coupled with the mid-day meal programme, has helped bring a lot of children into school""as the finance minister has said. Enrolment rates from age 6 to 14 have gone up to 93.4 per cent. There are more teachers and more schools. But does this translate into outcomes?

Unsurprisingly, educationists are not interested in being held accountable for delivering outcomes. The education establishment is happy to get customers (i.e. enrolment) and to get paid (i.e. more spending on education). But there has been no interest in measuring outcomes. In this situation, the ASER 2005 report, done by Pratham, is a milestone. It examines schoolgoing children from ages 7 to 14 and finds that 35 per cent of children cannot read a small paragraph with short sentences of 1st standard difficulty. It finds that 52 per cent of children cannot read a story with some long sentences, of 2nd standard difficulty. That is, more than half of the children in India fail a 2nd standard test. The report also finds that 41 per cent of the children cannot do a two-digit subtraction. And that 66 per cent of the children cannot divide a three-digit number by a one-digit number.

These findings raise fundamental questions about SSA. SSA sends a lot of money into the government school system, without thinking about the incentives for teachers to teach. It constitutes a mere intensification of the failed policies that have been followed for 50 years. Even today, after SSA has come into place, teacher absenteeism continues to be a huge problem all over the country. The government system excels at a system of patronage through which jobs are given out. Regular teachers are grossly overpaid. The regular teacher is paid about Rs 8,000 per month. Sometimes, the recruit spends Rs 1,000 on finding a teacher at the market price to do some work, spends Rs 1,000 on bribing senior officials to be quiet, and thus gets Rs 6,000 per month as the rental value of the post.

The need of the hour is not more money for education. India is doing fine on the size of public expenditure on education. The need of the hour is to re-think education policy in ways that favour students and not educationists. Institutional reform is required, which will shift power from producers to customers, to emphasise the twin themes of accountability and competition.

Parents care more about their children than educationists and politicians. Even though public schools are free, parents of all income classes have been buying private education. The Pratham study finds that 16.4 per cent of children are in private schools (with a 60:40 ratio of boys to girls). In addition, myriad parents buy services of private coaching classes to overcome the lack of teaching at school. But SSA ignores private schools; it merely sends resources to public schools.

The UPA has blithely blundered into mistakes like the education cess, and vast expenditures through the Budget, without understanding the complexities of this field. The formation has failed to question the conflicts of interest when existing producers control public policy.