Abstract
This article begins with an overview of the current elementary education scenario in India. It notes that while the Right to Education (RTE) Act has made progress in access to education, the delivery of education has worsened. The article analyses the reasons for this by using two main levers of the system: financial support and accountability. As far as support is concerned, three areas need attention, specifically, the low funding of education when compared with the global average; a mismatch between funds approved, actual funds available and funds spent; and inefficient, delayed and rushed expenditure. In terms of accountability, two main systemic gaps have been explored: accountability at the input level instead of the output level and accountability to funders instead of the community, with an emphasis on teachers’ accountability. Based on findings from analyses, the article concludes with recommendations for the better performance of the education system and argues for an overhaul of the processes that are currently in place.
Universal Elementary Education in India: A Reality or Fantasy?
India adopted the National Policy on Education in 1986 (revised in 1992) marking a landmark moment in the education movement of our country. It stated the national belief that education was ‘essentially for all’ and emphasised that education was a ‘unique investment’ for the present as well as for the future well-being of a nation. Almost 30 years later, we are still in the process of making this national perception a national reality.
Alongside the spirit of the education policy, in 2002, with the 86th Amendment Act, the Constitution of India inserted the provision of free and compulsory education for all children in the age group of 6–14 years as a fundamental right.
In order to legislate this provision, the Right to Education (RTE) Act was formulated in 2009 and came into force on 1 April 2010. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 makes various kinds of provisions, for both the infrastructure as well as the quality of education by listing basic essentials such as student–teacher ratios; permanent teachers; minimum instructional hours; teacher training; and the presence of toilets, playgrounds and boundary walls.
However, as with any important transition, there are few essential steps to make ‘educated India’ a reality.
If we want cooked food, we cannot expect it to materialise out of nothing. We will have to invest in the raw materials (vegetables or flour) that will be cooked, the condiments to add flavour, some kind of fuel and a person with the essential know-how to bring all the elements together. Similarly, in the case of education, the first step is ensuring the accessibility of raw materials for education to the citizens—this would involve ensuring the presence of schools, classrooms, teachers and textbooks. This is the primary step on which the entire process is built.
The second step is the one that makes the first step meaningful. We can hire a professional cook and provide him/her with fuel, vegetables, spices and some oil. However, just positioning all this in a kitchen will not translate into food. The cook will have to actually light the fire, cut the vegetables and cook to produce the food.
Over the years, we have been building a vast factory of education in our country, investing time, money, dreams and a lot of intellectual debates into it. Our expected product is an educated India, and we expect all the raw materials, mandated by the RTE Act, to actually churn out quality education. Herein lies the need for the second step. It is not really just one step, but more of a continuous effort of bringing the inputs in motion, making sure they are accessed and used, ensuring their effective and efficient functioning and thereby producing the output that this education factory was built to produce—Universal Elementary Education.
Overview of the Current Situation
Putting the Inputs in Place: Access to Education
In 2009–2010, when the RTE Act was put in place, the school education budget was ₹ 26,800 crore ($ 4.236 billion). In the financial year (FE), 2015–2016, this has now increased to about US$ 6.1 billion 1 (this is, however, a significant reduction from the 2014–2015 budget, which will be discussed later in this article). The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2 Report 2014 shows us that though the situation is far from perfect, one can observe a marked improvement in school facilities from 2010 to 2014, especially in terms of a compliance with the pupil–teacher ratio norms, student–classroom ratio norms, boundary wall and playgrounds, library books and computers as well as drinking water and usable toilets.
The National University of Education Planning and Administration (NUEPA) Review Report on Education For All (Ministry of Human Resource Development [MHRD], August 2014) tells us that the access and reach of education have increased admirably. Presently, about 98 per cent of rural habitations in India have a primary school within a distance of 1 km and both the net enrolment ratio (NER) and the gross enrolment ratio (GER) have improved significantly. 3
Setting the Inputs in Motion: Delivering Quality Education
While the first process, that is, putting inputs in place, has admittedly resulted in significant progress over the last few years, in terms of translation of these inputs into quality education, India seems to have taken a few steps back.
Various tests and surveys conducted over the last few years have shown a strong evidence of the deplorable quality of the Indian education system. The ASER surveys (2009 to present), CORD-NEG village studies, 2010–2011, the WIPRO-EI Quality Education Study, 2011 and many others have repeatedly revealed low levels of student achievement in India at the primary level. The tests conducted by the government support these results as well. The National Assessment Survey conducted by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) noted that in 2012, only 59 per cent of students in class III could read and understand a simple passage and only 57 per cent could do division.
It is significant that an increase in the funding of education has not had a positive impact on the levels of student achievement at all. In fact, the ASER studies demonstrate that although fund allocation for education increased after the RTE Act came into effect, strangely, the learning levels of children decreased. The proportion of children in class V who can read a class II level text has decreased every year from 2009 to 2012, dropping from around 53 per cent in 2009 to 47 per cent in 2012. The results were worse in government schools where the percentage of class V children who were able to read class II-level text decreased from 50 per cent in 2009 to 44 per cent in 2011 to 41 per cent in 2013 (Pratham, ASER Report, 2013). In fact, Pritchett and Beatty’s review demonstrated that not only are pupil achievement levels low but they do not improve as the students continue with their schooling. Out of the children who failed a simple test, the proportion that could not pass the test even after 1 year of schooling was between 80 and 90 per cent (Dreze & Sen, 2013, p. 126).
India’s embarrassing performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) came as a reality check to a country fed on a completely different rhetoric. At a time when we were congratulating ourselves on increasing enrolments and funding, the new strides taken by the government, and a history that emphasises knowledge, wisdom and enlightenment of its citizens, our performance in the global context came as a shocking setback. Out of the 73 participating economies in 2009, India (both public and private schools) ranked second to last, even when just two of the best performing states in the country participated in the assessment (Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh).
Having now crossed the deadline for the full implementation of the RTE Act mandate, 31 March 2015, there is a serious need to assess why we are unable to take the next step—the step from access to delivery, from classrooms to learning and from students’ enrolment to students’ learning.
Systemic Review of the Current Situation: Support and Accountability Framework
In a Knowledge Briefs article titled ‘Supervision of Primary and Secondary Education: A Five-Country Comparison’ (2010), the World Bank, at the request of the government of Poland, reviewed five countries with high educational outcomes having diverse geographic locations and governance approaches to education. Despite significant differences, the report found common elements in the approach focus of the countries. Each of the five countries was found to use two primary levers to improve student outcomes. These were support and accountability. ‘All five countries understand that insisting on accountability without offering support is unfair, while support without accountability can be unwise’ (World Bank, 2010).
Using these two levers, this article assesses the validity of current educational systems towards achieving the goal of universal education in India.
Support
Support may be of various kinds (training, research, informational, resource and so on), but here we will specifically look at financial support, the primary kind of support that makes all the other kinds of assistance possible. While money alone may not be sufficient to ensure the effective functioning of any programme, it is a necessary condition for any kind of programme to function at all.
Before we even begin talking about performance and efficiency, it is important to first understand whether the money that is funding the world’s largest provider of elementary education is sufficient to ever realise the dream it intends to fund and to realise our goal of universal elementary education. A little comparison and contextualising might help us get a better understanding of the situation.
India’s Funding of Education versus the Global Average
India funds its education through schemes that are considered to be among the largest in the world. Among these initiatives, the ones that primarily provide elementary-level education to children are the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA) 4 and the Midday Meal (MDM) schemes. The SSA is the primary mode through which the RTE Act provisions are expected to be realised, accounting for about 66 per cent of the total Government of India (GoI) budget for elementary education. When we compare SSA allocations versus average global expenditure, we see a tremendous difference.
Global Comparison of per Child Expenditure on Primary Education
a Plan Outlay, 2009–10, 2012–13 & 2013–14; Union Budget, GOI.
As shown in Table 1, India is spending extraordinarily low amounts on education by any standard. The per child allocation of $34 under SSA in 2009–2010 is less than 2 per cent of what other middle income countries like Brazil or Argentina are spending. (Note that the Indian figures are for allocations and not expenditure, which is even less than the former.)
Similarly, while most of the comparable countries in the world are spending at least 15–17 per cent of their per capita GDP on every student at the primary level, India is at a distant 9 per cent. These figures definitely question India’s commitment to achieving universal education (Table 2).
Global Comparison of per Student Expenditure as Percentage of GDP per Capita in Primary
Approved Funds versus Spent Funds
The SSA allocations are based on an Annual Work Plan and Budget (AWP&B) submitted by the state governments. These plans are supposed to be the aggregations of school-level plans developed by the school management committees (SMCs). After negotiations with the GoI, total state-wise allocations are finalised and shared between the GoI and the state governments on a 65:35 ratio. 5
SSA Funds Approved versus Spent in 2012–2013 and 2013–2014
Although a decentralised structure of fund allocation planning was designed for the SSA in order to meet the needs of individual schools in individual states, the actual process on the ground is far from what was planned. There appears to be a mismatch between the total SSA budgets approved by the GoI, the actual funds available after they have been released by the GoI and the state and the amount of funds that is actually spent. Table 3 demonstrates this difference for the past two FEs.
Note that efficiency seems to have increased and differences reduced in 2013–2014 when compared with 2012–2013. However, this has come at the cost of lowering the funds approved and consequently the funds expended on education, when, as established previously, India can hardly afford to reduce its already minimal education budget.
Inefficient and Delayed Expenditure
Yamini Aiyar, in her article ‘From the Right to Schooling to the Right to Learning’, gives a concrete description of the fund flow structure of the SMCs. The funds for SSA do not flow through the state treasury, instead they come through the bank accounts of specifically created State Implementation Societies (SIS) in the following manner:
GOI and State Government → State Implementation Society → Fund Transfer Account of Directorate of School Education at District-Level → Fund Transfer Account at Block Level → Bank Account of SMC.
This multi-step process makes for multiple points of inefficiency and delays in the system, creating huge loopholes in the effective functioning of the process. In many states, there is a significant delay in the funds reaching the schools, consequently leading to a cycle of delays in the expenditure for requirements in various schools. This means a delay in getting textbooks for the students, a delay in carrying out urgent infrastructural repairs, a delay in a Block Resource Centre (BRC) receiving funds, thus hampering their ability to visit and support or monitor the schools in their jurisdiction. For instance, many government schools in Jharkhand had not received textbooks even after 4 months into the academic year of 2014–2015 (Sahuliyar, 2014).
The SSA funds are released in two instalments for each year, one in April and the rest in September. Each instalment is based on two main things: the AWP&B plan approved for the year and the expenditure that the state has already incurred. In simple terms, each state has to show that they have spent the money they had previously received to get the next instalment of funds. In case of any unspent balance, the funds released to the state is adjusted accordingly. Now, when schools receive their funds late, they are pressurised to spend the received money in a hurry in order to claim the next instalment. This is not exactly creating an environment conducive to efficient spending of resources.
The Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) 6 paper on SSA in its Budgeting for Change Series (2011) notes that with funds arriving late, ‘expenditures are rushed, with money being spent on needless infrastructure creation, that too of poor quality’. Thus, even the money that is finally spent is not always spent in a needs-based manner.
India’s Commitment to Financial Support: Is It Real?
The three above-mentioned points, more than anything else, establish the absurdity of our expectations for the present level of spending on education to be actually translated into any demonstrable change. The government is not only spending negligible amounts but also not spending it in the right way or on time.
Despite all the evidence pointing to the contrary, the funding on elementary education is being decreased instead of increasing in the last couple of years. In the FY 2013–2014, the total SSA allocations (including the GoI and state’s share) decreased by 32 per cent from $ 11 billion to $ 7.7 billion (Plan Outlay 2012–13 & 2013–14 Union Budget, GOI) in the FY 2012–2013. Consequently, the per-student allocation also decreased from $ 90 to $ 60. The GoI’s SSA allocation has further reduced by 19.3 per cent from 2013–2014 ($ 4.3 billion) to this year 2015–2016 ($ 3.5 billion) (Plan Outlay 2013–14 & 2015–16 Union Budget, GOI). While we do not have the state-level data yet, it is obvious that with GoI’s decreasing allocation,, the states’ allocation will decrease as well (keeping in mind the 65:35 centre to state ratio), thus further reducing the per-student allocation in our country.
Moreover, it should be noted that the majority of the GoI’s allocation for SSA is primarily funded by a 2 per cent education cess called the Prarambhik Shiksha Kosh (PSK). The education cess was introduced in 2004 as a 2 per cent levy on the income tax in order to raise additional financial resources to help the government fulfil its commitment to elementary education. Proceeds from the PSK are mainly used for the SSA and MDM scheme. For the current FY 2015–2016, the total GoI allocation for SSA and MDM is $ 4.9 billion and the estimated proceeds to be received from PSK is $ 4.3 billion. It is evident that what was supposed to have been an additional help to the GoI to boost its funding to primary education is now becoming the foremost contributor to elementary education allocation in the country.
This raises serious questions with respect to India’s commitment to education funding of the nation, and its failure to prioritise the need for the educated, informed and thinking citizens of India.
It is important to realise, however, that there is no single lens to look at an issue which is as vast and complex as education, and money alone is not a guarantee of quality education. One of the glaring examples supporting this argument is the United States which spends enormous amounts on education and yet academically performs substantially worse than countries with less funds but following more efficient methods of spending them. For instance, even though Portugal’s per student expenditure is almost half of that of the United States, both the countries received similar scores in PISA 2012. Likewise, even though Korea spends less than 70 per cent of what the US spends per student, it is one of the best performing countries with respect to education in the world.
However, money cannot be completely overlooked either. Even one of the least spending good performing OECD country- Czech Republic, spends around $ 4000 per student at the primary level - thirty times more than the 2013–14 allocation of India.
Accountability
Chavan and Banerjee in ‘The Bottom Up Push for Quality Education in India’ lament that information does not seem to translate into action when it comes to education. Most people know the problem; we repeatedly quote disheartening results, yet there appears to be no concrete action to fix those problems. The reason lies in two very intrinsic aspects of the present systemic process that makes action difficult.
Accountability at the Input Level Instead of the Output Level
We know who to go to if there is no boundary wall or kitchen shed in a school. If girls in a village refuse to go to school due to the absence of separate toilets for girls, we know whom to blame and send our complaints to. The same goes for textbooks, the midday meal, teachers’ attendance and so on. These are no doubt important but in our focus on the minutiae, let us not lose sight of the overall picture. All these inputs are in place for a reason and the reason is to bring universal elementary education to our country. However, if all these inputs are not translating into actual education or learning, then who is accountable?
In the present system, accountability stops at the input level, and although the students’ learning outcome may give a sense of joy or despair to the nation, there is no concrete accountability system in place for it. Government support also does not lend itself on the basis of such learning outcomes. The funds released by the state depend on the number of schools, unspent balance and utilisation certificates prepared by the schools: There is no stake on the educational performance of the school.
With the ‘no detention’ policy of the RTE Act 2009, the comprehensive and continuous assessment (CCE) system had created some hope for a new and improved method that measures children’s learning instead of memorising capacities, doing away with the kind of pressure that schools tests were found to create on young children. However, many schools are using the inbuilt flexibility of CCE as an excuse for ‘automatic promotion’ of students (till class 8), without testing their learning levels at all, so that there is now no information generated on student achievement levels in many schools across the country. This kind of abolishment of evaluation methods cannot be the logical solution. After all, tests are not just to evaluate students, they also provide information about student learning levels and the schools’ and teachers’ functioning, without which there can be no informed improvement of services. Effectively speaking, a school could run for decades without any of its students learning anything, and yet each of those students can be certified as ‘class 8 pass’ by the schools. This is a scary thought.
The System’s Inputs Are Accountable to Funders Instead of Beneficiaries
The SSA has provisions of checks and counterchecks at different levels from the parent members in the SMCs to the Cluster Resource Centres (CRCs) and Block Resource Centres going on to the state and national levels. The whole process has been designed so that each level in this broad machinery is monitored. Although this is admirable, it is perhaps important to understand the difference between monitoring mechanisms and accountability mechanisms. Being monitored by a particular individual/group does not automatically make us accountable to that individual/group.
This whole system was planned to ensure decentralisation of funding and monitoring mechanism across different levels. However, what it lacks is decentralisation of power, which continues to lie with the central or state governments and was far removed from the actual schools. For instance, the schools receive various grants like maintenance grants, teacher learning material (TLM) grants or development grants. And although the schools have control over the funds to make that expenditure, they have no say as to how the money would be spent; they have strict guidelines as to where each rupee goes and each rupee is accounted for by the state government. If one school, say, decides they need to spend more money on TLMs, and less on infrastructure, they cannot use the money given for the latter on extra TLMs; any kind of financial sanction, no matter how small, has to happen straight from the state government. Due to the tight budgets that government schools work under, the schools can afford no flexibility; any new expense, however small, has to go through a long process of getting approvals through the complex SSA fund transfer structure (as shown above) from the state government, and then the approved fund has to again retrace that complex path back to the school in need.
Moreover, while the SSA grants some space to schools in having a say in designing a fund allocation plan for the state (although, as we see, the actual SSA allocation is much less than the AWP&B approved by the GoI), the schools are powerless with regards to any flexibility, and do not have any say in the actual spending of the funds that they finally receive—which is the same for every school in the state.
Teacher’s Accountability
One of the biggest loopholes in terms of accountability is the teachers’ accountability. There are various guidelines with respect to teachers in the RTE, that is, for training, attendance, teaching hours and so on. All of this is done to ensure quality teaching in schools. The SMCs, BRCs and CRCs are required to monitor the performance of the teachers. However, as noted above, monitoring does not always translate into accountability. The attendance of teachers continues to be a source of concern, and the student learning levels have demonstrated a deteriorating trend over the years.
In most government schools located in rural areas, the teachers tend to be non-residents of those villages. They are outsiders to the community, living in the village, often one of the highest earning and elite members of the village, treated with the awe and distance that such a position offers. They are appointed, paid and managed by the state government, which makes them accountable to the government, that is, effectively to someone who is sitting, maybe, hundreds of miles away without any direct stakes. Thus, a teacher’s accountability is limited, as is their sense of responsibility to their ‘real clients’, that is, their students and the local community.
India, the Complex Conundrum
Any analysis of the Indian education scenario and deliberations on solutions will be incomplete without commenting on the complexity, that is, India and its unique social and cultural diversities and the history it carries.
At the beginning of this article, we quoted a study which analysed five good performing countries in the field of education, pinpointing their similarity in that all of them focus on two primary levers to improve student outcomes: support and accountability. We then critiqued the Indian situation using the same levers. However, it is important to note that each of those five countries is a comparatively small and homogenous entity with a much smaller population than that of India. None of those countries has to grapple with the kind of number and differences that India has to constantly tackle. They also, understandably, have very different historical backgrounds from that of India.
Historically, education has been an integral part of Indian rhetoric and its importance has also been reiterated by politicians, economists, literati and philosophers alike. Yet somehow, this rhetoric has not manifested itself into actions. Right after India became independent, in the 1950 Constitution, Article 45 called for a provision of free and compulsory education within a period of 10 years for all children till they completed 14 years of age. The ‘ten-year period’ that envisioned for ensuring education for all (EFA) has long since been forgotten. It was 36 years after the passing of the Constitution that India came out with the National Policy on Education in 1986 stating the unique investment that education was for the present and the future of the country. Policies, as we know though, have no legal force on the ground, and the state is not legally bound to implement them.
After the 1986 policy, 16 years later in 2002, the 86th amendment to the constitutional directive made education a fundamental right in India, which led 7 years later to the passage of the Right to Education Bill in 2009. Right to Education became an Act in 2009, which then 1 year later, officially was enacted. The constitutional directive of 1950 thus took 60 long years to gain the legal voice to ensure free and compulsory education for all children in the country.
This is, of course, not to say that no action was taken in those 60 years. There have been innumerable policies and aims set for education, various prime ministers and ministers for education have set up new and different commissions to review, analyse and suggest ways forward. Countless articles and speeches have been delivered. However, as Angela W. Little 7 has noted in her different Consortium for Research on Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE) articles, ‘[In India,] broad statements of goals cannot be taken seriously as policies if resources for their implementation are neither identified nor allocated and if their objectives are infeasible from the outset’ (Little, 2010). Along similar lines, Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen have noted multiple times in their powerful social analysis, An Uncertain Glory, that despite the strong ‘pro-education rhetoric’ in India through history, India continues to perform poorly on educational standards, and there seems to be an alarming lack of political will to improve the situation. The continuous inadequate funding, detailed in this article, is evidence of that lack of will. The second evidence is the increasing dependence on the private sector to cater to what is essentially a state responsibility. In the same book mentioned above, Dreze and Sen argue along various points against such dependence on the private sector. Giving examples of other countries, they show us that ‘the spread of literacy across the world has been achieved overwhelmingly through state education’.
In fact, education has been the primary focus of all East Asian countries rapidly progressing along the economic scales that India constantly benchmarks herself against. Moreover, the entire profitability and business model approach of the private sector makes the market delivery of education detrimental to the public, making it vulnerable to all the flaws that commercial goods are vulnerable to—issues of affordability, inequity in delivery, informational withholding driven by market demands, absence of accountability and so on. The increasing dependence on the private sector, more than anything else, indicates a deliberate casting off of responsibility by the state from one of the primary public necessities for a progressing population and for a progressing economy.
This lack of political will, however, is not uniform across the country and there are huge state-level differences. Between 1950 and 1976, education was a state subject, managed almost exclusively at the state level. This means that there were almost as many kinds of education provisions in India as there were states in the country. The difference between one state to the other, in the syllabi, the importance given by the government to education policies, the funds allocated for education and the policies that were in place were huge. In 1976, education moved to the concurrent list, so that now its responsibility was shared between the state governments and the centre. In 1986, with the National Policy on Education and corresponding centre-sponsored programmes, like Rajiv Gandhi’s Operation Blackboard, there was a lot of push by the centre for educational reform in the country. The sudden thrust and directives by the centre was however not immediately accepted by the states, and it led to political tensions. On the one hand, the centre tried to assert their influence manoeuvring the educational policies across the different states, and on the other hand, some of the states tried to resist the central intrusion into what they saw as an area historically within their jurisdiction. Slowly, as the states started accepting the centre’s role over the years, they also started competing with each other to meet targets set by the central government for education. Now, this is a healthy development that could potentially benefit students sitting in the classrooms in the middle of all these political and social cross-plays. However, unfortunately while certain targets are more concrete and visible, others are far more subtle, more subjective and often take years to be evident to the public eye. Thus, while building more schools and reaching every last habitation can be a lucrative target to decorate a state minister’s portfolio, working on quality of teaching and learning in classrooms is not something that can be very visible as an achievement, and by the time it bears fruit, the minister might no longer be in office. Quality of education thus often takes a back seat in most states, unless some official or minister takes a personal interest in it; systematically, there is no policy in place to make working on quality visible and, therefore, rewarding for those making the decisions.
Along with this, there is a tremendous amount of mismatch between the different government departments and the goals set by them. For instance, throughout this article, the author has mentioned the dwindling funds allocated for education. The annual budget is of course announced by the Ministry of Finance. The budget allocated for education should ideally be informed by the AWP&B submitted by the state governments. As shown earlier, however, this is far from the case. Further, the pay commission recommends the salary structure of public servants in the country, which includes schoolteachers. The salaries of teachers have seen an enormous hike over the years, not matched by the budget allocated by the Ministry of Finance. The state governments, burdened with the task of meeting the various demands of the RTE Act, along with the maximum pupil–teacher ratio of 30:1, has to now appoint more qualified teachers within these high pay scales using money they do not have. This has resulted in huge numbers of vacant positions of teachers, and various classrooms across the country being run by temporary and inadequately qualified teachers who are hired at very low salaries on an ad hoc basis until the vacant positions are filled. This is one of several examples of the curious mismatch of policies and resources of different departments working together on a common issue.
Alongside all these political forces in the country, one should keep in mind the socio-cultural forces running through the country as well. India was, and unfortunately continues to be fed with a culture of hierarchies based on caste, age, religion and so on. Caste-based hierarchies were/are embedded with occupation-based hierarchies. Renowned political scientist Myron Weiner explains that the political culture of India is embedded with a belief system based on the role of education in maintaining the difference between groups in a hierarchical social order, and a clear division between those ‘who work with their minds and rule and people who work with their hands and are ruled’ (Weiner, 1991, p. 6). According to him, it is this belief system that is the main reason why mass education has not been achieved in India. Thus, despite large-scale rhetoric on having a ‘inclusive education system’ and removing barriers of caste, gender and other socio-cultural differences, it was not, and still is not in the best interest of a large part of the nation, especially the powerful middle class and the businessmen, to have an educated country. Having the entire country educated could mean 1.2 billion Indians demanding respect, minimum wages, social benefits and decent working conditions. This could potentially mean dismantling the entrenched power structure, that is, those who are ‘privileged with good education opportunities’ ruling over those who are not by using their cheap labour services.
Throughout this article we have argued that there are serious systemic gaps in terms of (i) government support and seriousness of its support for the education policies and laws in place and (ii) the kind of accountability in place (what is accountable and what is not, and who is/is not it accountable to). We believe that these two elements lie at the root of the reason why our various education manifestos have not translated into action and that the convergence of these two levers is the exact spot where any kind of reformulation of policies should strike. However, the complex conundrum of the Indian education fabric within which these two elements lie needs to be understood and kept in account to ensure that the debates and solutions sought are holistic and informed.
Conclusion
To fully really realise our goal of free and compulsory elementary education (assuming we equate education with actual learning outcome of the students), the foremost, urgent and most immediate requirement is a greater investment of resources, and a greater commitment for making such an investment possible. Expecting the present allocation of resources to achieve our lofty goals is unrealistic and absurd.
However, increasing allocation alone is not enough. Allocation needs to translate into actual spending, and even then, the spending needs to be done in a manner that is both efficient and needs-based, which results in verifiable change. Simply put, spending that is being done to fund a country’s education should actually translate into an educated citizenry.
Aiyar in her article recommends having the grants distributed to schools on per child basis. 8 Supporting her recommendation, it can be argued that schools should be given a greater autonomy and ownership of resources. The funds disbursed need to be student and school focused, reflecting the wide differences in performance between schools. Each school can then utilise the funds in a manner that best suits its needs and those of its students. Further, there has to be a provision of a minimum amount calculated with a realistic understanding of needs and expenditure, which every school must receive.
And even for the allocated money, an effort needs to be made to have allocations translate into spending. Timely and efficient disbursement of money should be ensured so that spending can be needs based, instead of a hurried attempt to show utilisation to the state.
Moreover, Indian education system needs a decentralised accountability system, along with a decentralised monitoring system such that the inputs and actors in this wide machinery are answerable to the beneficiaries (students/parents/community) instead of being answerable to the source of funding. The monitoring systems in place right now are well intentioned but incapable of actually affecting any power on the school or school functioning.
Further, accountability at the level of outputs (i.e., the student outcome) along with that at the level of inputs needs to be established. There is a real need of the system and its actors to take ownership for the actual learning of the students, instead of just meeting the inputs as stipulated in the RTE guidelines. Better standardised systems for assessing students’ learning levels would help in ensuring that learning outcomes are accounted for.
As we keep extending deadlines in our efforts to implement the RTE Act, while continuously berating the system for its inability to deliver, we need to stop and reflect if the present systems are even equipped to shoulder the great load that it has been made to carry. Despite obvious evidence pointing towards their ineptitude, why do we demand that present funding and systemic structures deliver a dream they are incapable of delivering? Instead of just critiquing it, we need to seriously consider a complete overhaul of the present system, one that requires a greater commitment to the economy of education and greater power to the actors and beneficiaries on ground.