Experts debate on India's education policy

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Nandan Nilekani: The Indian government's education approach has been clumsy and unwieldy. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of the governments in school education was on building infrastructure with little emphasis on teacher training, educational achievements and performance measurements.

As a result, the total number of illiterates continues to grow even as states haplessly built school after ineffective schools, schools that were hollow promises with little teaching taking place within the buildings. Our education policies have funded schools not schooling.

This is a passage from Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India: Ideas for a New Century, captures the current crisis in our classroom. Of an estimated 140 million children in the age group of 6-14 in primary schools, 50% cannot read simple words or solve simple arithmetic problems in the fifth grade. Only 58% can read a simple story and 42% can do a division problem shameful statistics for a country that aspires to be an intellectual capital. The biggest challenge continues to be the glaring disparity between privately-run and government-run schools. One of major reasons for the dismal state of primary education is placing the control of schools in the hands of middle government and state bureaucracy leading to the lack of standardization.

There is some reason for hope. In 2000, in his Independence Day speech, Atal Bihari Vajpayee spoke of full literacy by 2010. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government met this problem with well funded, highly publicized efforts--the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) or the Mission for Universal Education. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) retains this scheme and ramped up funds with 2% primary education cess implemented in 2004 and a 1% cess for secondary education implemented in 2007. However, the solution to solving this crisis is not political attention and funding but creating truly well-efficient, well-functioning schools.

To discuss the ideas to address the challenges in our classroom, we are joined by Shobhana Bhartia, Chairperson and Editorial Director of HT Media; James Tooley, Professor of Education Policy at the University of Newcastle and the Author of the landmark paper on trends in Indian schools, 'Private Schools for the Poor'; and Madhav Chavan, Co-Founder of Pratham, a Non-governmental organization (NGO), whose mission is to get every child in school and learning well and the Author of Imagining India, Nandan Nilekani.

Here is a verbatim transcript of the discussion. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: Education is a fundamental right but our track record has been dismal. The universal education goal has been deferred from 1959 to 1960s to 1970s possibly not even going to be met in 2010 but how optimistic are you that for the first time we are actually seeing public expenditure in schooling. But is that really going to solve the problem?

Nilekani: I think there is definitely a lot of room for optimism because for the first time the Indian state is trying to address these issues and as we talked about the fact that the SSA was started by the NDA government but UPA government consolidated that-there is 3% cess. That is a lot of money because our annual tax collection is about Rs 500,000 crore. So you get Rs 15,000 crore a year for cess money that goes only for primary and secondary education. So I think there is a huge push. If you look at the Eleventh Plan, the Tenth Plan only had 7.7% of its money for education, it has 19% of its money for education. So there is no doubt that the development of human capital is now the central challenge. It is now politically fashionable but the question is making it work on the ground.

Q: Is it going to be working on the ground in the manner in which it was envisaged given the fact that we have upped spending incredibly much more than we have ever in India's history?

Chavan: The way it was envisaged was to get all children in school which is working out. We do a household survey and 93-95% kids, 93% age 10 upwards and more than 95% from age 6-10 say we go to school. So that has happened. There is a school within a kilometre of 98% habitations where there were insufficient classrooms in places like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (UP) more classrooms have been built. Teachers are being appointed. So, that quantitative part has been met.

Q: What to your mind are the challenges with the manner in which the SSA is being implemented?

Chavan: There are many issues, because the first priority for the government was to open schools, construct schools and recruit teachers in states-- the entire northern belt from West Bengal to Rajasthan--that were lagging behind. So that is where the money was pumped-in, large amounts of money were pumped in and the teachers were appointed. There is a whole issue of human capital as Nilekani was saying, even teachers. Do we have good teachers, because we have a very poor higher education system. Graduates coming out of that are barely literate, really. And so if they have to be become teachers then you have a case where half blinds are teaching other blinds and then how to retrain these people to make classrooms effective. That's the second part. And there is a system somewhere which is centralised, bureaucratic which is not capable of reforming itself.

Nilekani: There is no point in having a school if teachers don't come to work and part of the reason is that the schools are not under the local government leadership. They are not under Panchayats. They are under some state administration, and therefore, they are not accountable to the locals. So the problem of education is moving from enrolment to quality, again from getting people into schools to making sure that they are well taught and that's a huge change.

Q: Do you think we have seen a change as far as political support towards education is concerned?

Bhartia: Absolutely. I think governments have realised that education does translate into votes. Education is a state subject as we know. So there has been enough emphasis on it and the budgetary outlays have increased fourfold over the last few years. So the bipartisan support that education receives, that Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan itself has received is very apparent and it is evident. Then it gets into the realm of how each state actually uses it and it gets more into a qualitative issue where certain states are actually doing a lot more than other states are doing. But just in terms an area which is getting a lot of emphasis.

Q: A point as far as the different state experience is concerned because you have a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with about 14 state governments now. What's the experience been like for you at Pratham?

Chavan: Our experience is that states that have been backward so far with the exception of one or two states are hungry to perform. I can state Bihar very clearly. In Bihar there is a huge drive. And you can see that the chief minister downwards people want to change. What happens is that the state that had achieved universal education in the last decade like Kerala, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu were sort of relaxed and even Karnataka for that matter was late to wake up on what needs to be done quality wise because they have reached a point beyond which the government is not thinking that is all children in school, give everybody mid-day meals, send textbooks, so-called teacher training. But what is the next level of quality that you can achieve? Nobody has thought about that and that is where the problem lies.

Q: You have extensively studied education in India, specifically, the mom-and-pop sort of schools that have emerged. What is your reading of the situation?

Tooley: What has been missing from the discussion so far-might have just been talking about the growth in enrolment in the urban areas, 98% of that growth in enrolment over the last decade has been because of the private schools. I think in the rural areas it is something like 40% or 50%.

These low-cost private schools are mushrooming. They are serving the very poor families. There is many research now, including Madhav's research, my own research and others, showing these low-cost private schools are outperforming the government schools.

So, they are serving a huge number of families. They are doing better than the government schools at a fraction of the cost. That is another important thing. So, you have got this potential here for a huge revolution to take place. It is estimated I think that there is one private school in every two Indian villages. That is three lakh private schools in the villages probably the same or a huge number in the cities. You've got all these entrepreneurs who are willing to do something about education. So, I think within a very short time, the problem of quality will be solved nationally.

Q: Let's talk about that issue, entrepreneurs getting into the business of education now. It is increasingly hard. Just for a city like Delhi you actually need 14 licences to be able to get a school up and running?

Nilekani: Yes, that is the challenge. I think certainly primary education is a public good. The state has to make sure that everybody in the country gets free, high-quality primary education. The question is, should it be delivered through their own mechanism, their public schools or do they have aided schools like they have in Kerala where they have private schools funded by the state, or your pure private schools like the ones that Mr. Tooley talked about. That is where the big fights are going on today in India.

Q: From a corporate India point of view, we have heard several corporates saying they want to get involved. But they find several challenges and hurdles in the form of the regulatory mechanism that doesn't allow them to do so. What do you think needs to change?

Bhartia: Primary being that I think the corporate sector needs a lot more autonomy. If you are to go in and run a school, you need autonomy in terms of deciding on the fees, in terms of deciding on the syllabus. You have teachers who are there and you have to learn to teach with them, you cannot change the teachers.

Q: But it is also the notion of education cannot be something that you can profit from?

Bhartia: No, that is a separate issue altogether. Whether or not you want to make education for profit is different. For instance, in UP (Uttar Pradesh) they won't even transfer the building or the land to the private sector. Some states like Punjab are a lot more flexible. There you have seen certain corporates have gone in and started the public private partnership and are doing a far better job.

Chavan: When you say private participation, I see various issues that arise. Urban and rural are completely separate. In rural, at least you have land. In urban, in places like Hyderabad University, in Mumbai, in Kolkata, many parts of Delhi there is no place. That is a part of planning that I keep fighting with Nilekani about that in the urban renewal mission in India, we should be actually saying preserve the school spaces, like you have a playground. So, it is a question of town-planning.

One thing that is lost and which needs to be looked into is the social division that happens because of the private inclusion. Yes, there could be a private provision. But how do you make sure that it doesn't divide a village down the middle so the poor go to the government school, which is always seen.

When you talk about control, government actually is willing to give up control, but politically people don't have the mindset of saying hand it over.

Nilekani: The question is how do you have private schools and equity at the same time? Otherwise, only the slightly more well off children will go to the private schools and the poorest who have no access will go to the public schools and nobody will bother about it.

Chavan: It also happens along gender. The brother goes to private. You have seen 60% kids in private schools are boys and 40% are girls.

Nilekani: One child is given that education.

Bhartia: Dr. Amartya Sen has even said that this is what is preventing or hindering the improvement of the government schools because the better-off and the more influential people are sending their children to private schools, and therefore, they are not putting the pressures on the authorities to actually upscale the teaching.

Tooley: I am not sure if that is a reason. The poor abandon the government schools because in them their children feel abandoned. There are ways of getting this equity issue.

First of all, the schools themselves--our large-scale surveys in Delhi, in Hyderabad and rural Andhra Pradesh, we found the school themselves were giving free places, scholarships to the poorest of the poor. Typically, we found about 7% of places were given free.

In the urban areas, there is not that gender difference. I know you find it in the rural areas. In the urban areas, I work in Muslim Hyderabad, old city Hyderabad where there are equal numbers of girls and boys in the schools. In fact, more girls at the higher levels than boys. So, that picture is changing.

I take issue with your idea Nilekani that you need it to be free to everyone. I think there has got to be a free provided as a possibility.

Nilekani: No, I think in any society we have to think of primary education and the public good. If it is a public good then every child must have access to a school without paying fees.

Tooley: There must be an access but if parents prefer to pay fees, small fees like Rs 100-200 a month.

Nilekani: I agree with you, we should give them choices.

Tooley: If they prefer that because then the school is accountable for it.

Nilekani: But we cannot have the state coping out. The state has the obligation to make sure that there is 100% literacy in the country.

Chavan: When we say free and compulsory education, it is interpreted as compulsorily free education. You have to turn it around--this was done in Madhya Pradesh. There was a hospital, a Rogi Kalyan Samiti programme, which won a World Bank award, global development network award, where the hospital was opened up post the Surat plague scare saying that if you want to pay, you can pay. You are allowed to pay and the system actually prospered.

Then when the government changed it was disbanded. But actually that is a great idea because the Panchayat first of all is authorised to collect taxes. So, they should be able to collect local taxes or ask people. If you want to pay, come in and pay Rs 5 at any time, there is no compulsion. But this whole idea that you will not pay is running away from accountability. I think that is a very important distinction that we have to make.