India’s Big Government

by Vivek Kaul

Simply stated, the Law of Unintended Consequences refers to a situation wherein government decisions have unexpected effects. Here is an example. As Kaushik Basu writes in An Economist in the Real World:89

  To ensure that all rural people get good education, West Bengal made it compulsory for all teachers, including the best, to serve a term in rural areas. The biggest difference this made was [that] it changed the catchment areas of ‘best’ teachers, since many talented people preferred not to become teachers or, if they were already teachers, they preferred to move out to other places, where they would not be rotated; and this was an important factor in the decline of Kolkata as the leading hub of higher education.

  Hence, the West Bengal government’s decision ended up having the opposite impact that it was expected to have. Something like that seems to be happening because of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act as well. The Act is referred to as the Right to Education (RTE) Act in short.

  The Act was passed on August 4, 2009, and made free and compulsory elementary education a fundamental right for children between the ages of six and 14 in a neighbourhood school till the completion of elementary education. Elementary education was defined as education from Standard I to Standard VIII. The Act came into effect from April 1, 2010.

  The hope was that many years of wrong would be set right with the RTE. But, as we shall see, nothing of that sort has happened.

  The Constitution had envisaged the Right to Education as a Directive Principle of State Policy, which the state should strive to achieve. As it stated: “The State shall endeavour to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education to all children until they complete the age of 14 years.”

  The 86th amendment to the Constitution, made in December 2002, inserted Article 21A, which basically stated: “The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine.”

  The 86th amendment was followed by discussions which ultimately led to the RTE Bill, which was passed by the Rajya Sabha in December 2008. The Lok Sabha passed the Bill on August 4, 2009, and it received Presidential assent on August 26, 2009.

  With this, India became the 135th country in the world to make the Right to Education a fundamental right. The legal basis comes from Article 26(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which essentially states: “Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory.”

  Here are some of the important points of the RTE Act:

  1) Every child between six and fourteen has the right to free and compulsory education in a neighbourhood school. If there is no school in a particular neighbourhood or area, the RTE Act calls for its establishment within a period of three years of the commencement of the Act by the appropriate government and local authority.

  2) If a child above six years of age hasn’t started school, then the RTE Act states that he should be admitted to a class which is appropriate for his age. The Act also states that the child should be given special training so that he is brought on par with others in the class within a certain time frame.

  3) The RTE Act clearly specifies that the teacher should complete the entire curriculum (i.e., the syllabus) within the specified time.

  4) The Act also makes it very clear that no child should be held back in class or expelled from school until he has completed his elementary education. This basically means that there are to be no exams and students keep moving from one class to another, irrespective of whether they are good enough for the next class or not. The Act also makes it clear that no child should be required to pass any board exam until the completion of elementary education, and no child should be subject to physical or mental harassment.

  In fact, there is another interesting sub-clause in the Act. Section 29(2h) calls for “comprehensive and continuous evaluation of [the] child’s understanding of knowledge and his or her ability to apply the same”.

  5) The Act also specifies the teacher-to-student ratio. For Standards I to V, having up to 150 students, a ratio of one teacher per thirty students is specified. If the school has more than 200 students, then the ratio should be more than one teacher per forty students. For Standards VI to VIII, a ratio of at least one teacher per thirty-five students has been specified.

  6) The Act also clearly specifies the kind of infrastructure a school should have. These include separate toilets for boys and girls, safe and adequate drinking water facilities, and a kitchen where a mid-day meal can be cooked. The school is also expected to have a playground. The school building is expected to be secured by a boundary wall or fencing.

  The schools also need to have a library, which provides newspapers, magazines and books, including storybooks. Play material, games and sports equipment need to be provided for each class, as required.

  If these conditions are not met, then the government shall withdraw its recognition to the private school. The order withdrawing recognition needs to clearly specify in which neighbourhood school the children studying in the school from which the recognition has been withdrawn are to be admitted.

  If the school from which recognition has been withdrawn continues to operate, it shall have to pay a fine of Rs. 10,000 per day.

  7) The Act calls for the establishment of a School Management Committee (SMC) consisting of elected representatives of the local authority, parents or guardians of the children studying in the school, as well as teachers. Furthermore, at least threefourths of the members of the SMC are to be parents and guardians. Also, women need to make up half the SMC.

  8) The Act also talks about the local government making the necessary arrangements to provide free pre-school education for children above the age of three in order to prepare them for elementary education from the age of six onwards.

  9) The Act prescribes that teachers cannot carry out any private tuition activity. It also specifies a minimum number of working days for schools. Standards I to V need to operate for a minimum of 200 days during the course of a year. Standards VI to VIII need to operate for a minimum of 220 days during a year. Furthermore, Standards I to V need to be taught eight hundred hours per year. Standards VI to VIII need to be taught for one thousand hours per year.

  10) The Act requires government-aided schools to provide free and compulsory education to a minimum of 25 per cent of their intake to children belonging to the weaker sections of society. Also, Kendriya Vidyalayas, Navodaya Vidyalayas, Sainik Schools and private schools are required to admit 25 per cent of their intake in Standard I from among children belonging to the weaker and disadvantaged groups in the neighbourhood and provide them with free and compulsory elementary education until its completion.

  These were the salient features of the RTE Act. As can be seen from the Act, it is very input driven. It expects schools to have a certain infrastructure and teachers to teach a certain number of hours and complete the syllabus. It also expects schools to set up an SMC with parents or guardians forming a majority. It expects the government to provide pre-schooling facilities as well in order to get the students ready for elementary education.

  The Act also specified a ratio of one teacher per thirty students. This comes from the belief that smaller class sizes lead to better learning. I put this question to the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, who has done extensive work in this area, a few years ago. And this is what he had to say:

  The younger the child, the smaller the class size should be. So when you get to these very young pre-schools, it seems like a ratio of three children per one teacher is about the right size. I am talking about kids one year of age, who are very demanding, so you really can’t supervise them. However, when you get to the higher levels of education, class sizes can grow, and there the evidence on class size is a little bit weaker. Schools in the north-east of Brazil did not even have a ro
of over their heads. … They had no text-books. So spending more money on those schools turned out to be a very good thing. They had a huge number of students and a very small number of teachers. So, smaller classes and more resources played a huge role in increasing the Brazilian quality of schooling. But if you were to move that discussion to Sao Paulo – just go south into a more urban area – then large classrooms per se were not the problem, even resources per se weren’t the problem. It was typically what happened to the kids when they walked into the classroom, from the aspect of student discipline and so on, which was the problem. So I think that the focus in the past has been on the class size and that may have been overstated.

  The trouble with the RTE, as stated above, is that there are no learning outcomes that have been specified. The economist Abhijit Banerjee explained this beautifully in a talk at a literature festival in November 2012, where I happened to be present.

  As he said: “We did one experiment in Bihar which was with government school teachers…. The teachers were told: ‘Instead of teaching as you usually teach, your job for the next six weeks is to get the children to learn some basic skills. If they can’t read, teach them to read. If they can’t do math[s], teach them to do math[s].’ At the end of six weeks, these teachers were given a small stipend. They had also been given a couple of days of training.”

  And how did the students do? As Banerjee recounted: “At the end of six weeks, the children had closed half the gap between the best performing children and the worst performing children. They had really improved enormously.”

  So what was happening here? The teachers did not have to complete the syllabus in this case, as the Right to Education mandates. They had to teach students what the students did not know.

  As Banerjee put it:

  The reason was that they were asked to do a job that actually made sense. They were asked to teach the children what they didn’t know. The usual jobs teachers are asked to do is to teach the syllabus – which is very different. Under the Right to Education Act, every year you are supposed to cover the syllabus. It doesn’t matter whether the children understand anything. Think of all the Standard IV children who can’t read. They are learning Social Studies and all kinds of other wonderful things – except [that] they can’t read. They are learning nothing. They are sitting in a class watching some movie in some foreign language without subtitles. Hence, the drop-out rates are high. And I am shocked why anybody comes to school at all.

  Central planning and Big Government essentially try to implement what they think is the best outcome. But that is easier mandated by the law than implemented in reality. Instead of concentrating on just inputs when it comes to the RTE, we should also be concentrating on learning outcomes.

  As Banerjee said:

  The problem of education has a perfectly good solution. In the first four years, we should prioritise the learning of basic skills – forget about learning the history of the country, etc. You don’t have to know who Gandhiji was for the first four years. Let’s just concentrate on students being able to read and do simple maths. I think that such a system would deliver a much better outcome. One thing we forget is that ‘perfect is the enemy of good’. We are trying to have an education system that is perfect and in which every child would come out with wisdom at the end of it. As a result, they learn nothing.

  The question is: Why is this happening? The lack of regular attendance, both of teachers as well as students, has its impact. Furthermore, the focus is on finishing the syllabus. Given this, the teachers concentrate on that and not on how much learning is taking place. In the process, they end up addressing the needs of a small portion of the class which follows what is being taught and leave out the rest.90

  What does not help is the fact that the RTE makes it very clear that no child should be held back or expelled until the completion of elementary education. Hence, there are no exams. This basically means that the entire class keeps getting promoted, but most of them don’t learn the things that they should.

  Till the RTE came along, the Indian education system was very examination focused. In fact, it still is. During the summer months, when results to different competitive exams as well as board exams come out, news about a spate of suicides hits the media.

  Hence, the idea, supposedly, was to bring down the anxiety of students regarding exams. Another reason was that exams and detention force the students to drop out of the education system quickly. The trouble with this argument is that ultimately, at some point of time, students will have to write exams. And what will they do about it then?91

  As the data from the ASER Report of 2014, highlighted earlier in the chapter, clearly points out, the learning outcomes, especially in government schools, have gone down dramatically since the RTE came into place.

  As Madhav Chavan, the CEO-President of the Pratham Education Foundation writes in the ASER Report of 2014:

  Just when it seemed like the ASER results were getting repetitive, the Right to Education Act was passed (in 2009) and suddenly things began to change. In ASER 2010, we first noticed that the proportion of children in private schools was growing and learning levels had begun to decline. But the Ministry of Human Resource Development officially neither recognised ASER nor did it accept its findings as far as learning levels were concerned.

  One theory that has been offered regarding the fall in learning standards is that since students are not held back in a class and everyone moves to the next class, this has led to a relaxation in classroom teaching.92 Interestingly, in Rajasthan, parents met the Chief Minister Vasundra Raje during her outreach programme and suggested that the ban on exams was not in the best interests of children. A September 2014 newsreport suggested that the state was considering exams in Standards III, V and VIII.93 Another suggestion that has been made is that while it is fair not to hold back students up to Class V, yet after that the approach needs to be relooked at.94

  Ultimately, the problem is that the input-driven approach of the RTE is not translating into basic learning for students. As we have seen earlier in the chapter, their ability to read and do basic maths remains fairly limited. This ability has come down dramatically since 2010, when the RTE became the order of the day. A similar lack of ability is visible among students who go to government school, when it comes to reading simple sentences in English, as can be seen from Figure 3.5.

  Figure 3.5: Percentage of children in Std. V who can read simple English sentences.

  Source: Trends over Time (2006-2014): A Supplement to ASER 2014, January 2015.

  As is clear from Figure 3.5, the ability to read simple English sentences has fallen dramatically in government-run schools over the years. This inability of students to read and do basic maths is extremely worrying. As the 12th Five-Year Plan document pointed out:

  The biggest concern in elementary education is the poor level of student learning—both scholastic and co-scholastic/non-cognitive. Evidence suggests that learning outcomes for children in Indian schools are far below corresponding class levels in other countries, and that the learning trajectories for children who remain in school are almost flat. Clearly, the additional time spent by students in school as they move from one class to another is not translating into much improvement in [their] learning levels.

  Madhav Chavan, of the Pratham Education Foundation quoted earlier, estimates that in the period of the ten years up to 2015, 10 crore children completed primary school without the ability to do some basic reading and mathematics. And this, as I have repeatedly pointed out throughout this chapter, is primarily because of the input-driven approach of the RTE.

  As Lant Pritchett, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, puts it: “The Right to Education legislation doesn’t in fact provide the right to education at all. It provides the right to attend a school. Whether that school actually provides an education—that apparently is not how some advocates want the problem framed. They want to define a ‘quality’ school as one with a set of
inputs, and that is that.”95

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  Typically, governments tend to tackle a problem by allocating more money towards it. In the case of the RTE, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (National Education Mission) was identified as the main vehicle for implementing the provisions of the RTE.

  The total allocation to the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) in 2009-2010 (the central government as well as the share of the state governments) was at Rs. 27,552 crore. This was obviously in the pre-RTE days. Once the RTE came into force on April 1, 2010, allocation towards the SSA increased. In 2012-2013, the total allocation was at Rs. 69,982 crore.96 This dropped to Rs. 56,529 crore in 2014-2015. In 2015-2016, the amount stood at Rs. 63,408 crore.97

  What this tells us is that allocation to the SSA has gone up by more than 100 per cent since 2009-2010, even though the money allocated has fallen in the recent past. How do the numbers look if we look at the allocation per student? In 2010-2011, the allocation per student (excluding the union territories) had stood at Rs. 3,511. It jumped to Rs. 5,596 in 2012-2013.98 In 2013-2014, the allocation per student dropped to Rs. 4,044, before jumping up to Rs. 5,330 in 2015-2016. This jump happened partly due to a 2 per cent drop in the school enrolment numbers.99

  If we take consumer price inflation into account, Rs. 3,511 in 2010-2011 would be worth around Rs. 5,154 in 2015-2016. Hence, the allocation per student has gone up only marginally over the years. Nevertheless, the learning outcomes have fallen.

  The assumption was that, with money being allocated towards the SSA, the school infrastructure would improve, and that would lead to improved enrolment in schools. The enrolment levels have improved. The National Sample Survey estimates that, as of September 2014, the proportion of out-of-school children between the ages of six and 13 was only at 3 per cent. Out-of-school children are essentially children not enrolled in a primary school.

  The assumption was that, once enrolments improve, the learning would happen automatically. As Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo write in their book Poor Economics—Rethinking Poverty and the Ways to End It:100