Opinion - News Analysis   

The case of the missing teachers

V. Jayanth

With one in four government primary school teachers absent on any given day, and only one in two teaching, India is wasting much of its budget for education, a study finds.

AT A point of time when there appears to be a significant push towards increasing budgetary allocations for education, India may be "wasting a considerable share of its education budget and missing an opportunity to educate its children." A World Bank-Harvard University study has found that in India one in four Government primary school teachers are absent on any given day, and that only one in two would be actually teaching. The study has suggested a variety of potential reforms in the system.

The study, that involved "unannounced visits" in a nationally representative sample of government primary schools in the country, has shown that 25 per cent of teachers were absent from school and only about half were teaching. Rates of absenteeism varied from under 15 per cent in Maharashtra to 42 per cent in Jharkhand. The rates were found to be higher in the "poorer States."

In this study of 20 States, three unannounced visits were made to 3,700 selected schools. The focus was on government-run primary schools, but rural private schools and private aided schools located in villages were also surveyed.

"Our absence data is from direct physical verification of the teachers' presence, rather than attendance logbooks or interviews with the head teacher. We consider a teacher to be absent if the investigator could not find the teacher in the school during regular working hours," the report by a five-member team said. The team members were Michael Kremer and Karthik Muralidharan of Harvard University, and Nazmul Chaudhury, F. Halsey Rogers, and Jeffrey Hammer of the World Bank.

Teacher absence was found to be less where a system of "daily incentives" to attend work existed. Teachers were less likely to be absent from schools that had been inspected recently; those that had better infrastructure and were close to a paved road. "We find little evidence that attempting to strengthen local community ties will reduce absence... Private school teachers are only slightly less likely to be absent than public school teachers in general, but are 8 percentage points less likely to be absent than public school teachers in the same village."

Embarrassing record

The report, which compares the situation in India with other countries, notes that it has "the second highest average absence rate among the eight countries for which absence calculations based on a similar methodology are available." These countries are Peru, Ecuador, Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh, Zambia, Indonesia, India, and Uganda. The only country worse off than India was Uganda, with a 27 per cent absence rate. It was only 16 per cent in Bangladesh and 19 per cent in Indonesia.

Within India, Maharashtra had the lowest rate — 14.6 per cent. In Kerala it was 21.2 per cent, in Tamil Nadu 21.3 per cent, in Karnataka 21.7 per cent and in West Bengal 24.7 per cent. On the higher side. The rate was 34.4 per cent in Punjab, 37.8 per cent in Bihar, and 41.9 per cent in Jharkhand.

The study also sought to find the reasons for teacher absence. It was considerably higher than could be accounted for by non-official teaching duties — such as staffing polling stations during elections or conducting immunisation campaigns. Detailed interaction with the head teacher or primary respondent showed that only 4 per cent of the instances of absence were owing to "official non-teaching duties." Absence to the extent of another 8 to 10 percentage points could potentially be attributed to annual leave, medical leave, and other officially sanctioned reasons.

Going into the categories of absence of teachers, the study found that it was 30.2 per cent in the case of head teachers, 22.2 per cent in the case of deputy heads, 23.1 per cent in respect of permanent or regular teachers, and 24 per cent in the case of contract/informal candidates. An effort to correlate instance of absence with other factors did not lead very far. "Higher teacher salaries do not seem to be associated with lower teacher absence. We did not directly collect data on individual teacher salaries, but in every Indian State, salaries increase with education, experience and rank. Teachers with a college degree are 2 to 2.5 percentage points more likely to be absent." One reason for higher pay not being related to lower absence may be that these teachers feel "little risk of being fired for absence."

Silver lining

A silver lining was that teacher absence was considerably lower in schools with better infrastructure, a potentially important pointer to the importance of working conditions. Another finding was that teachers in schools that had been inspected in the three months prior to the study were about two percentage points less likely to be absent than other schools. Between a district with no inspections in the preceding three months and one where every school had been inspected during that period, there was a 7 percentage point difference in the number of instances of absence.

Private school teachers, it was found, were only slightly less likely to be absent than public school teachers. But they faced a greater risk of being dismissed from service for absence.

Local communities could perhaps provide an alternative means of monitoring the situation. The lower absence rates in schools with relatively more educated parents and high pupil-teacher ratios perhaps points to the fact that local monitoring is more effective when parents are more educated and more parents could potentially complain about the absence of teachers. Schools that had had Parent Teacher Association meetings during the preceding three months were found to have lower rates of absence.

The study suggests that a variety of potential reforms may be worth exploring. These could range from improving school infrastructure to increasing the frequency of inspections to experimenting with new and potentially more effective forms of local control.

Educationists and academics who looked at the study said that the infrastructure issues were being addressed through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme of the Union Government. Education being a subject on the Concurrent List, the Centre and States need to act in tandem and deal with the problems. Teachers have their problems too. The problem of school dropouts is serious too. Perhaps, the two were also inter-related. The "Universalisation of Primary Education" programme needs a review and close, constant monitoring if the investment in education is to yield the desired results, a former Madras University Vice-Chancellor suggested.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Teaching dissidence to LTTE
In breach of world trade rules
An emergency for rural childhood
The elections that matter
Time for equanimity at Nirvachan Sadan
The flawed trial of Saddam Hussein
The case of the missing teachers
Corrections and clarifications
Appalling apathy
Fairy tale promises
SBI strike
Muddled generation

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu