Elementary education: road ahead
MANABI MAJUMDAR
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India still has a huge ground to cover before ensuring universal elementary education
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UNIVERSALIZING ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN INDIA — Uncaging the `Tiger' Economy: Santosh Mehrotra, P.R. Panchamukhi, Ranjana Srivastava, Ravi Srivastava; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 695.
THE ECONOMICS OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN INDIA — The Challenge of Public Finance, Private Provision and Household Costs: Santosh Mehrotra — Editor; Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., B-1/11, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area, Mathura Road, New Delhi-110044. Rs. 640.
One half of India is certainly not shining, let alone poised for "a glorious tomorrow", as it continues to stay educationally challenged, with a large number of its school-age children still remaining out of school. Encouragingly, however, even in the league of the educationally disadvantaged States not all are standing still; the initial lag notwithstanding some are forging ahead. Differently democratic and differently decentralised, India therefore consists of States having differing registers of educational progress and prospects. With such a motley group of educationally developed, educationally improving and educationally backward States, does India look like a "tiger" economy waiting to be uncaged, with a pool of human capital and skilled labour required to unleash its economic growth potential? The answer surely is more complicated than a simple yes or no. And very rightly the two companion volumes under review focus on the crucial need to develop a regional perspective to this continuing conundrum.
Financing aspects
To be sure, the relationship between education and earnings is not the leitmotif of the two books. Rather, they address the first-order problem first, namely, that a large part of India has still a huge ground to cover before ensuring universal elementary education (UEE). The various State-specific studies included here press us to "learn from the comparative experiences of different States" in this respect. It is both the burden as well as the strength of the two volumes to have seriously engaged in exploring the financial options that the so-called education laggards, often weighed down by severe financial crises, might have to actualise the crucial goal of UEE. Drawing on regional contrasts to the problem of State finances that seems to impede this process, the two books offer several interesting results and ideas on the "financing aspects" of elementary education.
Arguments and analyses presented in the volumes are amply supported through copious evidence collected from a large-scale survey covering "more than 120000 households, and 1000 schools spread across 91 districts" in seven educationally disadvantaged States of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal and in "one of India's star performers in elementary education, Tamil Nadu."
Findings
The insightful findings presented here both corroborate and at times challenge the conventional understanding of the subject under study. Intriguingly, "the drop-out rates remain the highest in the entry grades of the primary and upper primary stages for each of the selected States." This possibly suggests that the school system fails to provide a sympathetic environment for the fresh entrants that could prevent their premature fall through the net of education. Again, almost all of these educationally needy States have been receiving support under the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP), but some of the more deserving ones within the league are the relative losers as compared to others, reflecting in turn their uneven political clout and lobbying skills.
Problems in utilisation of funds further add to persistent resource constraints. For example, the various benefit schemes such as the supply of free text books and uniforms that are supposed to relieve the monetary burdens of poor parents seem to work with varying degrees of success; the educational leader like Tamil Nadu fares much better than the laggard like Bihar in this respect, indicating the significance of "State/institutional" effects on educational performance, quite independently of the import of the quantum of funds per se. Another major trouble spot, as several contributors point out, is the yawning gap between funds sanctioned for the DPEP and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and funds actually released from the Centre to the States. It is indeed a shocking revelation , for example, that at the end of fiscal year 2002-03, at the Central level, "SSA funds sanctioned were Rs.30.78 billion, but the amount released was Rs.11.72 billion"; the corresponding figures for the DPEP were Rs.22.90 billion and Rs.10.55 billion respectively. It is appalling that in the face of acute problems of State finances, a sizable chunk of the Central Government grants is either not released, or not utilised, raising deeper doubts about the uneven administrative and absorptive capacity of the various States.
Rural-urban divide
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the various school-related statistics presented here is the stark reality of inequality in public spending. The rural-urban divide in the distribution of educational resources stares in the face of the reader with unfailing regularity. For example, "Survey findings indicate a clear difference in the provision of teachers in rural and urban areas. By and large, there is a predominance of schools with more than three teachers in urban areas." This is particularly true of the more educationally disadvantaged States. Again, the ratio of upper primary to primary schools is highly unfavourable in rural areas in almost all the study States (one upper primary school for as many as six primary schools in rural West Bengal), threatening to delay the transition from lower to higher grades of elementary education.
Throughout the 1990s, "the per child spending was much higher in high performing States (like Tamil Nadu) than in educationally backward States," with the exception of educationally improving States of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
With the declining Total Fertility Rate (TFR) and the resultant decrease in the absolute number of children at the primary stage, Tamil Nadu appears to be enjoying a democratic dividend such that even with the current level of educational expenditure it is possible to improve per capita expenditure and more importantly the quality of education. Thus, "universalisation with quality" comes up as a feasible option for a State like Tamil Nadu, whereas the other study States, sans the demographic bonus, fall into the trap of a quality-quantity trade-off.
Equality of opportunity
In the face of the crisis of State finances and the resultant ban on the recruitment of regular teachers in many States, "the common response of the State governments in the 1990s has been to hire para-teachers at a fraction of the salaries of regular teachers." Such policy response comes with its own share of problems, however, as one of the contributors admits, since there are as great worries about schools run by para-teachers on the learning achievement score as about regular primary schools.
Most disconcerting perhaps, and the point that could have been discussed a little more in the volumes, is the variation and unevenness even among resource-poor government schools, indicative of disparity in public spending.
To correct this imbalance in fund allocations, we need differential spending in favour of the special educational needs of poorer regions. The contributors could have paid special attention to the idea that deprived areas and groups must receive more than per capita share of educational resources if equality of opportunity were to be granted.
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