The Hindu Business Line : Elementary education: Far from standard

While there has been a considerable improvement in enrolment, more than half the children who join Std I do not complete eight years of school education. India Inc and the IT sector can lend a helping hand in improving the quality of elementary education, and the government must involve the corporate sector more closely, says S. D. NAIK.

PROBLEM OF quality deficit in elementary education is more serious in the rural areas.

The Constitution in its Directive Principles of State Policy (Article 45) says: "The state shall endeavour to provide within a period of 10 years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years."

However, in the five decades the Constitution has been in force, no serious effort has been made to implement this Directive Principle, and elementary education remains a grossly neglected area, though the literacy rate has improved at a modest pace.

The National Policy on Education (NPE) 1986, as modified in 1992, emphasised three points in respect of elementary education:

universal access and enrolment;

universal retention of children up to 14 years of age; and

a substantial improvement in the quality of education.

The NPE further emphasised that education must play a positive and interventionist role in correcting social and regional imbalances, empowering women, and in securing a rightful place for the disadvantaged and the minorities.

SARVA SHIKSHA ABHIYAN

It was only in 2001 that the government finally introduced the ambitious scheme of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). The aim was to ensure that all children between six and 14 attended school and received quality elementary education. The SSA aimed at achieving universal primary education by 2007 and universal elementary education by 2010.

However, towards the end of 2006, both the goals appear elusive even as the scheme now covers the entire country, except Goa. True, since the introduction of the scheme in 2001, State governments have reported that the number of children not attending school has come down significantly.

However, the scheme's implementation is still slow and inefficient, with more than one crore of children still out of school. Today, the country has about 290 million illiterates, seven and above.

The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) recently indicted the Department of Elementary Education of the Human Resource Development for what it called the `inept' implementation of the SSA. According to the report, interventions by the project implementation agencies were deficient to a large extent, leading to substantial gaps between planned and actual achievements in key areas such as classrooms, text-book distribution, provision of teachers, their training and other infrastructure, affecting the quality of education and coverage.

CHRONIC PROBLEMS

The SSA has not been able to make any dent in some of the chronic problems afflicting primary and elementary education.

While there has been considerable improvement in enrolment, the drop-out rate stands at 53 per cent for classes I-VIII, which means that more than half the children who enrol in Std I do not complete eight years of education. More worrying, the drop-out rate is the highest among the children from poor and socially-disadvantaged families. An IIM-A study of 13 States, of the 400 districts surveyed, only 190 showed a decline in the dropout rate after primary school. Even in respect of enrolment, it did not find the figures given by many States to be reliable.

For instance, a recent check by education inspectors in a relatively progressive State such as Maharashtra revealed that almost 12 lakh children `present' in education department records were "missing from the classroom". Schools in every district were found guilty of pumping up enrolment figures in order to retain government funding.

QUALITY DEFICIT

The problem of quality deficit in elementary education is more serious in the rural areas where there are a large number of single-teacher schools with no proper buildings and teaching materials.

A recent study of rural schools showed that more than half of class V students in five States with poor educational infrastructure could not read at the levels expected of Std II students. More than two-thirds of the students could not cope with elementary math.

The Annual State of Education Report (ASER), which was undertaken by Pratham, an NGO working in the field of elementary education with the help of more than 750 voluntary agencies as well as concerned citizens, has come out with some disturbing findings. Of the children surveyed in Std VI-VIII in government-run schools, 22 per cent could not read simple passages and 40 per cent could not do simple division. Private schools fared only marginally better. The reasons for such poor quality of elementary education are not far to seek. A nationwide study on teacher presence in schools found it to be less than 50 per cent in most States. Even in Kerala, acclaimed for its achievement in literacy, teacher absenteeism was as high as 40 per cent. The poor quality of education imparted at elementary level in most schools is not necessarily because of shortage of funds. The two per cent education cess imposed two years ago is generating around Rs 7,000 crore every year.

The allocation for elementary education during the Tenth Plan period, at Rs 28,750 crore, represents a 75 per cent increase over that in the Ninth Plan.

The World Bank gave $500 million in 2004 for SSA for utilisation over a three-year period. The real problem is poor governance and corruption at different levels. The supervision and monitoring of the scheme has been ineffective both at the national and State levels.

NEW APPROACH

Proliferation of private schools in the urban areas to meet the growing demand for quality education has tended to widen the divide between the rich and the poor. State governments have tended to abdicate their responsibility to provide adequate number of schools in keeping with the growing demand to provide quality education to all sections. Hence, a new approach is needed to tackle the problem of growing quality deficit in elementary education by seeking help from corporates, in particular the information technology sector. The need of the hour is co-operation of the private sector and not merely more private schools.

India Inc and the IT sector can certainly help improve the quality of elementary education on which depends the quality of higher education. In fact, a beginning has been made by such entities as the Azim Premji Foundation, Microsoft Corporation, Intel, IBM, CISCO, the NIIT and Aptech, and others. Some 27,000 schools across 29 States, covering 53 lakh students, have reportedly benefited from this partnership so far. The collaborating companies have also helped the government in developing educational software and the children in computer-aided learning. Computer-aided learning is expected to reduce the dropout rate and increase retention in schools.

It should be possible to bring about a dramatic improvement in the quality of elementary education system by involving more Indian and foreign companies and institutions.

Today, the corporate sector is also keen to help such causes as a part of its social responsibility effort.

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