India’s Big Government

by Vivek Kaul

  Somewhat bizarrely, the issue of learning is not very prominently positioned in international declarations. The Millennium Development Goals do not specify that children should learn anything in school, just that they should complete a basic cycle of education. In the final declaration of the Education for All Summit in Dakar in 2000, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the goal of improving the quality of education is mentioned only in the sixth position—out of six goals. The implicit assumption, presumably, was that learning would follow from enrolment. But, unfortunately, things aren’t that simple.

  From this, we can safely say that India’s RTE basically follows what we can perhaps call the international formula for achieving universal education. But, as Banerjee and Duflo point out, it doesn’t work. And they have extensive field experience achieved through carrying out randomised control trials in large parts of the developing world, including India.

  As Duflo puts it: “Learning is not about enrolment, teacher-student ratio [or] having latrines in schools; it’s about if we are serious about learning.”101 The question is: Are we serious about learning? It turns out that we are not. A basic problem with the RTE remains that—it expects children to be ready for elementary education when they enter Standard I. In fact, as Duflo puts it: “By the end of Grade 1, they are supposed to be done with reading…. It’s a complete fantasy.”102

  And why is it a fantasy? The first factor, which I have discussed earlier in this chapter, is the emphasis on the completion of the syllabus during the course of the year. The RTE essentially mandates that children are to be placed in classes according to their age, and not according to their level of learning. As the ASER 2013 report points out: “In a country where more than 60 per cent [of] government schools have multi-grade, multi-level classes and where more than 50 per cent lag at least two years behind, if not more, in terms of basic learning competencies, how is the teacher supposed to ‘complete the syllabus’?”103

  In fact, it is worth emphasising here that when a child joins Standard I, in most cases, he or she usually comes from a text-scarce environment.104 But the delivery of education does not seem to take this into account. As the ASER 2013 report points out: “Analyses of different Std. I textbooks across states reveal many underlying assumptions related to content, method and pace. At age 5, children’s ability to learn needs to be scaffolded well, but in most states the Std. I curriculum covers a great deal of content very quickly, so that many children get left behind even before they have started.”

  In the first few years, instead of trying to complete the syllabus it is important that the teachers and the education system teach basic skills to children. This basically means to teach them to read, write and do some basic mathematics. If a student has problems reading, you teach him or her to read. If the student does not recognise numbers, you help him or her with that. And so on. In fact, Banerjee and Duflo have carried out such experiments in different states and seen the learning levels of children improve.105

  With a no-child-held-back policy, these children keep getting promoted to higher classes. It is important that some sort of exams be re-introduced. One can understand not subjecting students in Standards I and II, and perhaps even in Standard III, to any exam. But not having exams until Standard VIII doesn’t make much sense.

  As Banerjee put it at the literature festival a few years back:

  The public education [system] is a system for the teachers, by the teachers and in the interests of the teachers. This is a system which essentially does not want any metric of performance. The excuse they give is that we don’t want children to be tested because children feel bad if they don’t do well. It’s true that children feel bad if you tell them in public that they have done badly. But there is no reason that testing has to mean public declaration of results. In Massachusetts [in the United States], where I live, test scores are only revealed at the grade level. So, for example, all fourth graders may have done badly at some school, but I don’t have to know if someone did well or badly.

  Exams have been replaced by what the RTE calls Comprehensive and Continuous Evaluation (CCE). Banerjee calls it “neither comprehensive nor continuous”.

  As Vimala Ramachandran, professor at the National University for Educational Planning and Administration, writes:106

  Post-RTE mechanisms like Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) have been reduced to a series of formats that teachers are expected to fill out. In one state, I asked the teachers about CCE, and several of them said that they just fill out the forms without actually conducting the activities with children. Administrators admit that they follow instructions from above and that they are not educators who can develop systems that can monitor children’s learning.

  Also, CCE in its current form entails the execution of sampled achievement surveys every three years to assess the quality of learning in students. The government, of course, defends it, but CCE “doesn’t give reliable information on what children have learned”.107 When the government reaches the stage when it ends up defending a faulty system, the country as a whole loses out in the process.

  There is a thing or two we can learn here from the No Child Left Behind Act of the United States, which was passed in 2002. The Act mandates that students be tested for mathematics and reading every year between Standards III and VIII. It further mandates that students be tested for science once between Standards III and V and once between Standards VI and VIII.108

  This, along with focusing on learning outcomes, sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do instead of trying to finish the syllabus. The question is: Will the government come around to doing this? It doesn’t look like that because no government likes to be told that it has been wrong all along.vi

  Furthermore, this is also likely to bring down the huge number of students dropping out from pursuing education. Table 3.3 shows the drop-out rates at various levels of school education in India.

  Table 3.3: Category-wise drop-out rates of children studying up to secondary school (in %).

  Source: Educational Statistics, Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2014.

  It is worthwhile noting that boys consistently drop out more often than girls across all categories and class levels. Also, with the exception of the children from scheduled caste families studying in Standards I to V, the drop-out rates for children from the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes are higher than the average drop-out rates for all three class levels.

  In general, the drop-out rates are extremely high. On the whole, in primary school, one out of every five students drops out. The proportion increases as the students move to higher classes. For Standards I to X, i.e., the complete secondary education cycle, nearly half of the students drop out (47.4 per cent, to be very precise). This is a clear reflection of the quality of the Indian education system.

  Nevertheless, there are other factors at work as well. As children enter their teens, there is great pressure on them to earn a living. The education system as it is currently structured doesn’t take this factor into account. What is really needed is the integration of vocational training which focuses on individual and practical skill development alongside regular education.109

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  One impact of the RTE has been that the proportion of students going to private schools has gone up dramatically over the years, as is clear from Figure 3.6.

  Figure 3.6: Gender-wise percentage of children in the age group of 6-14 years enrolled in private schools.

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

  In 2010, 23.7 per cent of the students were in private schools. By 2014, the number had jumped to 30.8 per cent. In fact, 2015 data from Punjab shows that 50 per cent of the students in the age group of six to 14 study in private schools. Around 48.5 per cent study in government schools. Hence, the number of students studying in private schools in Punjab is greater than those in government schools. A
round 1.5 per cent still don’t go to school.110

  In fact, if we look at the students studying in Standards I to V, around 54 per cent study in private schools.111 Even Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have greater than 50 per cent of their school student population enrolled in private schools.112 This is primarily because the quality of learning in government schools is low.

  At the same time, the performance levels of the private schools haven’t improved either. Nevertheless, they haven’t fallen, as has been the case with the government schools. This, perhaps, explains why parents prefer to educate their children in private schools.

  Interestingly, the proportion of students in private schools has been going up, despite many schools having shut down because they didn’t fulfil the conditions laid down by the RTE. These include conditions like schools needing to have a playground and a boundary wall.

  It is important to understand here that most private schools in India operate at the lower end of the spectrum and charge very low fees. Of the 3.3 lakh private schools in India which do not get any aid from the government, only around 16,000 schools are affiliated to boards like the Central Board of Secondary Education and the Indian Council of Secondary Education. The schools affiliated to these boards are the ones which charge high fees.113

  As per the National Sample Survey (2014), the median school fee was Rs. 300 per month in rural India. The median fee in schools in urban areas was Rs. 416 per month. This of course includes both high- as well as low-fee-charging schools. Given that these are all-India figures, the actual figures across states vary. For Uttar Pradesh, the figures were at Rs. 117 and Rs. 250 per month for rural and urban areas, respectively.114

  At these fee levels, it is difficult for many schools to meet the expenditure required to satisfy the conditions set by the RTE Act. As Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya write in India’s Tryst with Destiny— Debunking Myths that Undermine Progress and Address New Challenges: “At the fee[s] they charge, schools will not be able to meet these norms and standards. At the same time, poor families whom they serve cannot pay significantly higher fees.”

  This has led to the closure of schools all over the country. As the economist Geeta Gandhi Kingdon wrote in The Hindu in February 2016: “By March 2014, about 4,355 private schools had been closed down, and another 15,083 had received notices to close down.” This impacted around 39 lakh children.115 There are other estimates which suggest that a higher number of schools have shut down since the RTE came into existence in April 2010. A May 2016 newsreport points out that nearly 75 per cent of the private schools in Madhya Pradesh are under threat because they do not meet the norms set by the RTE Act. The report quoted an unnamed official as saying: “If recognitions of schools are cancelled, then 75-80 per cent of private schools in the state will be closed.”116

  Similar numbers come out from other states as well. Another newsreport suggests that the Chhattisgarh government sent out an order closing 2,918 schools in mid-June 2015.117 Data from the National Independent Schools Alliance (NISA) suggests that, in 2015-2016, 6,043 schools in nine states faced closure threats. The NISA data also shows that 7,796 schools in Maharashtra, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh received closure notices. Of these, 7,000 schools were in Maharashtra and 746 were in Punjab. The remaining were in Uttar Pradesh. As many as 998 schools were shut down in Madhya Pradesh during the same period. In 2014, 3,157 schools were shut down in the five states of Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Tamil Nadu.118

  In fact, NISA suggests that government functionaries often make unofficial statements in the media announcing plans to shut down schools which do not follow the RTE. This is not followed by legal notices being served to those schools. But what it manages to do is create a panic among parents, who start to worry whether or not the school their children go to will continue to exist.119 This is another version of the ‘inspector and licence raj’ that has impacted much of India’s economy over the years.

  This is something that Bhagwati and Panagariya talk about in their book. As they write: “Alternatively, it [i.e., the RTE Act] will create a large-scale ‘inspector raj’ in elementary education, whereby government inspectors will falsely certify that the school meets the prescribed norms and standards in exchange for an appropriate bribe.”

  There is nothing that stops education officials from first creating the fear of closure among private schools and then demanding a bribe. The irony is that Section 18 of the RTE Act exempts government schools and government-aided schools from having to meet the physical infrastructure norms.

  This kind of closure is clearly not a good trend, for the simple reason that a significant proportion of students do study in private schools. Furthermore, the financially stretched government is really not in a position to take on these students as well. It is worth pointing out here that the per-pupil cost in government schools is up to 20 times higher than that of low-fee-charging private schools.120

  This is the trouble with the input-driven approach that the government follows while implementing the RTE, which is clearly not working. The government should also look at the learning achievements of students studying in private schools rather than totally concentrating on just the physical infrastructure norms laid out by the RTE. In fact, this is something that the state of Gujarat has already done.121

  Nevertheless, this would mean a totally new way of looking at things. As Kingdon put it in a column in The Times of India: “The Act is completely silent on the things that really matter: teacher effort, teacher accountability and student learning outcomes.”122

  This is perhaps one of India’s bigger challenges, one on which one doesn’t find much discussion taking place, at least in the media. As mentioned earlier, between 2006-2015, nearly 10 crore students had completed their elementary education without the ability to do either basic reading or mathematics. This limits their income-earning prospects. It also limits the chances of the success of programmes like Make in India.

  As TN Ninan writes in The Turn of the Tortoise: “Acquiring job-related skills without the benefit of a basic education is a challenge—it is hard to be a fitter or an electrician at a construction site if you don’t know basic arithmetic and can’t read simple instructions on a product pack.”123

  iv The PROBE report does not make this point. It is the author’s interpretation of the figures.

  v The concept of the median is explained in Chapter 4.

  vi By government, I mean the bureaucrats who provide continuity to the government and not the politicians who come and go.

  4. JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!

  Haal chaal theek thak hai

  Sab kuch theek thak hai

  BA kiya hai, MA kiya

  Lagta hai wo bhi aiwen kiya

  Kaam nahi hai varna yahan

  Aapki dua se sab theek thak hai

  – GULZAR

  I started working for a daily newspaper in October 2005. India, at that point of time, was experiencing multiple booms. One of the booms was in the new equity mutual fund schemes that were being launched.

  As someone who had been hired to write on personal finance, I was expected to attend these new fund launches and then write analytical pieces around the same. At its peak, there was almost one new equity mutual fund being launched every week.

  On most occasions, there was nothing different about a new equity mutual fund scheme in comparison to the schemes already operating in the market. But then, when a boom is on, no one thinks about these things. The equity market had rallied for a few years, and investors were simply lapping up these new schemes.

  Due to various reasons, asset management companies which run mutual funds have always found it easier to raise more money by starting new mutual fund schemes than by selling old ones which have been around for a while and have a performance track record.

  In almost all of the presentations that were made on why investors should buy the new scheme being launched, one reason that the fund managers offered was that the India growth story was st
ill going strong. But no one ever bothered to explain what the India growth story actually was. In fact, for a while, I even thought that the fund managers were talking in some sort of code.

  As John Lanchester writes in How to Speak Money: “Practitioners of almost every métier [i.e., profession], from plumbers to chefs to nurses to teachers to police, have a gap between the way they talk to each other and the way they talk to their customers or audience.”124

  Over a period of time, I realised that it was much more than that. As Lanchester writes: “There are a lot of things… in the world of money where the explanation is hard to hold on to because it compresses a whole sequence of explanations into a phrase, or even just into a single word.”125

  The India growth story was that kind of phrase. In three words, fund managers encapsulated a whole sequence of things they thought would lead to the Indian economic growth continuing to remain strong in the years to come. Or, if I were to look at it in a cynical sort of way, fund managers wanted to sound like other fund managers. I guess it was a bit of both.

  Given the fact that I had no background in writing about these things, it took me a while to understand what the managers meant by the India growth story. While different fund managers meant different things, one common point that almost all of them talked about was India’s demographic dividend.

  They felt that India’s coming demographic dividend would keep driving Indian economic growth. And what is demographic dividend, by the way?

  The demographic dividend of a country is essentially a period of two to three decades when the birth rates go down, and this leads to a situation wherein the workforce of the country is growing at a faster rate in comparison to its population.

  Sanjeev Sanyal explains this in his book The Indian Renaissance, where he defines three stages: “In the first stage, there is an increase in the proportion of the young in the population as birth rates stay high but infant mortality declines.”126 The infant mortality rate is essentially defined as the number of infants who die before reaching one year of age for every 1,000 live births during the course of a given year.