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India’s Worrying Schools

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India’s Worrying Schools

For years, Indian policymakers were in denial about the scale of the problem facing the education sector. Is it too late?

Driving along the first ten kilometres of the beautiful, six-lane expressway that links the popular Delhi suburb of Noida with the immaculately planned Greater Noida, swanky office buildings, hotel developments and upscale condominiums vie for valuable real estate with newly-built, sprawling schools with names peppered with words like ‘international’, ‘global’ and ‘world.’

Gaia, a playschool for children aged two to five, is tucked away on a plot of land just off the expressway, its red-brick classroom huts looking relatively quaint next to the ‘major’ schools nearby.

But the unassuming nature of the buildings belie the grander plan schools like Gaia have in mind—to help reshape primary education in India. The shift away from conventional concrete is a carefully thought out one. Gaia has three huts for classrooms, an aquarium, an aviary, a duck pond and intricately carved stone and wood sculptures of animals including snails and caterpillars. A typical school day begins with a nature walk for students around its verdant campus, and children are encouraged to learn about colours, shapes and sizes outdoors.

‘We don’t want our children to learn by rote. We’ve done that for too long in this country,’ says Aditi Jain, the school’s founder. ‘Nature is the biggest teacher. Children need to discover, they need to be curious. Telling them isn’t enough.’

Jain’s school may be small, with only about 100 pre-primary students, but the challenges that the school is trying to help tackle are immense in a country struggling to revamp its shackled and creaking learning infrastructure.

The bulk of education in India is managed by the state and only the urban, upper middle class elites have access to more expensive private education options. Although surveys aren’t really needed to highlight the mess the education system is in, they do help illustrate how consuming the rot has become. According to a recent study by ASSOCHAM, the country’s highest body for its chambers of commerce, India came in a shameful second from last among seven developing countries in terms of education quality, scoring minimum points in primary, secondary, tertiary and demographic parameters when compared with Russia, Brazil, China, South Africa, Mexico and Indonesia.

Primary education in India was found to be most underdeveloped, while the quality of tertiary education in India also scored the lowest in the survey. On a scale of 2, India managed a meagre 0.1. Meanwhile, only 12 percent of school graduates were enrolled in tertiary education in India, again the lowest among the 7 nations.

Last year’s Indian Education Report had even more startling findings. Only 36 percent of Year Five students, it said, can actually do division sums correctly, while around 40 percent of all rural children in the same grade were at least 3 full grades behind in terms of education.

India desperately needs to put more children in school, educate them better and ensure its college graduates are employable global workers if it is to maintain its current economic growth rates and bring tens of millions out of poverty.

It’s a race against time, says Karan Khemka of Parthenon, a global strategy consulting firm that specialises in education. ‘If infrastructure is delayed, yes, you do delay growth. But, education is even more time sensitive. If we don’t give somebody a desirable option to go to college at 18, the opportunity is lost. This person might not take up the offer at 28.’

Data from Parthenon warns that India is in danger of actually being a less educated society in 2020 than it is now. In 2008, India had approximately 340 million people between 25 and 50 years without a college degree, a figure that could surge to 380 million by 2014. ‘Our demographic dividend could become a deficit,’ Khemka says.

After years of denial, the corridors of power in New Delhi finally seem to realise that things are broken and need fixing. Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Human Resource Development, is one of India’s most successful lawyers, and has brought what seems a genuinely reformist zeal to his first year at this crucial ministry.
On the sidelines of an academic lecture last month, Sibal laid out the mammoth task ahead.

‘In every developing country, the Gross Development Ratio (GDR) requires that out of 100 students, at least 40 should be able to go to college,’ said Sibal, pointing out that India lags far behind with its present 12.4 percent enrolment ratio (the United States has tertiary enrolment of 82 percent and the UK 59 percent). Although comparisons to developed nations could be considered unfair, Parthenon statistics suggest few countries full stop have a tertiary enrolment ratio lower than India’s.

Sibal has said repeatedly that India requires 600 universities and 35,000 colleges to reach an ambitious 30 percent college enrolment ratio in the next 12 years. Achieving this would require an aggressive building programme to extend capacity from the current 480 universities and 22,000 colleges, most of which also need intensive makeovers.

In June 2009, weeks after taking oath of office, Sibal unveiled a high-wattage 100 Day Action Plan to introduce rapid changes and to lay the foundation for sustained reforms. One year on, he has pushed through several landmark pieces of legislation. On April 1, 2010, India passed into law the Right to Education (RTE) Act, which provides for free and compulsory education for children between 6 and 14 years of age.

Although free and compulsory education for children until the age of 14 was one of the Directive Principles of the Indian Constitution, little was done to ensure these principles were implemented. If enforced properly, RTE will see an additional 8.1 million children enrolling at schools, and the act has also laid down stringent guidelines for infrastructure, ensuring quality education, making available a cadre of suitably trained teachers and extending government funding to private schools.

‘The act is a very good first step towards ensuring every child gets a right to education,’ says Yogita Verma, director of CRY, a leading non-profit for children. ‘But there are still several gaps that need to be plugged. In India, the scale of the education problem is so large that we need extra focus…The legislation by itself can’t guarantee results unless the mechanisms designed to put the law to action start working. Bodies put in charge of implementation need to start with a reality check on issues like infrastructure and come up with concrete plans. Communities need to play a big role in ensuring public functionaries are held accountable.’

For sustained progress, Verma advocates spending at least 10 percent of the Union and State budget on education, arguing that elementary education alone needs a minimum investment of Rs. 71,000 crores to make universal access to a decent standard of learning a realistic possibility. India currently spends roughly 3.5 percent of its GDP on education.

The central and state governments have worked out a 55:45 share ratio for the financial burden for implementing the RTE. States have secured Rs 25,000 crore from the Finance Commission, and the central government has already approved an outlay of Rs. 15,000 crore for 2010-11 for the act.

But concerns about implementation remain. The Hindu, for example, recently editorialised that funding seems grossly inadequate for achieving RTE’s noteworthy objectives, a fixed student teacher ratio, neighbourhood schools and training all teachers to a national standard. ‘The National University for Educational Planning and Administration calculates that implementation of the Act will cost Rs. 171,000 crore for five years,’ The Hindu said.

Attracting money into education isn’t the main problem, says Khemka. ‘Education is an incredibly prosperous sector. It has phenomenal characteristics—there’s more demand than supply, high barriers to entry and a high visibility of revenue. We have large corporate clients who are waiting to jump in.’

None of this can happen, he warns, until India massively de-regulates the sector and invites considerable private investment. ‘We’ve created an education regime that’s so paternalistic,’ Khemka says. ‘The government can’t afford the sort of expenditure our ramping up requires. It won’t make a difference even if the government spends double the amount of outlay in the next five year plan.’

‘It happened in China as well. Their economy is so much larger than ours, but even they had to de-regulate for education to grow,’ Khemka adds.

Still, there are no easy ways to break down the barriers. In early May, amid voluble opposition by the Left parties, the government introduced the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill in the Lok Sabha, the lower House of Parliament, which had been pending for over four years. ‘This is a milestone that will enhance choices, increase competition and benchmark quality,’ HRD Minister Kapil Sibal announced after the bill was tabled.

The Bill will allow foreign universities to set up campuses in India, and will be exempt from government regulation on curriculum design, teacher compensation and other day-to-day operational matters, a significant departure from how domestic institutions are currently controlled.

There’s a convoluted regulatory infrastructure of multiple institutions like the University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council For Technical Education (AICTE), which decide on every minute aspect of a college’s functioning. One of Sibal’s key goals is to replace these institutions with an apex National Commission for Higher Education and Research.

Yet despite the initial euphoria, and amid hopes that the bill will tempt the world’s biggest, most prestigious universities to set up shop in India, a heavy dose of caution is advisable. Establishing an offshore campus that mirrors an Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard’s multi-disciplinary ethos is no easy task, and these universities will be cautious about risking diluting their brand with shoddy quality. Indeed, many educationists have said the bill will, in fact, enable profit-seeking, second-rung foreign colleges to swoop in and make a killing. It’s a sell out, critics claim.

In a recent article, noted educationist Prof. Anil Sadgopal dismissed suggestions that the bill will improve quality through competition and he decried government policies that he said appear determined to demolish both public sector schools and colleges to allow for an ‘all-pervading commercialisation of education.’
‘As per market thumb rule, competition is a meaningful tool for quality improvement only if there is a level playing field,’ wrote Sadgopal, who was a member of the powerful Central Advisory Board of Education.

In the wake of independence, India built up a range of top-notch higher education and research institutions in the public sector like the globally recognised Indian Institutes Of Technology (IITs), Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and the Indian Institute of Science to name a few, he added. ‘Did these develop out of a spirit of competition, or from the Constitutional commitment to build a public-funded education system?’

Sadgopal used the United States as an example of how a vast system of high quality state-funded universities can demonstrate the public sector doesn’t require competition, with the motivating force instead being social and national development.

Khemka also has few expectations of the bill, saying he has been surprised by the ‘astounding’ attention it seems to have unjustifiably garnered. In no country in the world do foreign universities enrol more than one percent of the total number of students, he says.

‘And the scale in India is unprecedented. Higher education is so under-penetrated here,’ he says adding that India needs to increase enrolment from the 14 million students in 2008 to 22 million in 2012. ‘Foreign institutions can’t fill our 8 million seat deficit. We need to do this ourselves.’