Reality Check: India’s crumbling education system

Published by the National University of Educational Planning & Administration, Delhi, Elementary Education in India 2005-06 – An Analytical Report is a devastating indictment of government neglect of primary education which has extracted a heavy price from Indian society. Dilip Thakore reports After the euphoria, the cold reality check. Educationworld’s first detailed survey of India’s most respected schools, ranked according to the perceptions of a carefully selected sample of middle class parents, principals, teachers and educationists in 15 cities countrywide (EW August), generated unprecedented enthusiasm. For instance during the course of a follow-up seminar-cum-workshop attended by over 50 school principals and teachers in Ahmedabad on August 18, it became plainly evident that within India’s community of upscale educators the need for reform, contemporisation and upgradation of the education system is acquiring unstoppable momentum. Convened as it was within a few days of prime minister Manmohan Singh’s Independence Day address to the nation from the ramparts of Delhi’s historic Red Fort, during which he pledged his government to promoting 6,000 new schools, new colleges in 370 districts, 1,600 ITIs, 10,000 new vocational schools and 50,000 additional skill development centres as also seven new Indian Institutes of Management and eight Indian Institutes of Technology, speaker after speaker at the EW seminar in Ahmedabad urged a great leap forward in education – primary, secondary and tertiary – as the pre-condition of India’s transformation into an equitable developed society. Yet the scale and dimensions of the national effort required – particularly in the government sector (Central, state and local) – is beyond the imagination of the public and perhaps even the great majority of educators in Indian academia. The painful reality of Indian education is that its composition is of a few institutions of excellence atop a pyramid completely decayed at the base. This is particularly true of the school education system with the top 72 global standard primaries-cum secondaries ranked in the IMRB-EducationWorld survey the mirror opposites of the 1 million plus – especially government schools – providing unacceptably poor quality infrastructure and education to over 200 million children across the country. Therefore there was a unanimous consensus that ‘to raise teaching-learning standards to global norms’ (the theme of the EW August 18 seminar), requires not only massive investment by way of people, money and materials, but a revolutionary change of the national mindset and structural framework of the education system as well. In particular liberal encouragement of private sector trusts, societies and entrepreneurs into Indian education is an urgent necessity. This conclusion is confirmed by Elementary Education in India 2005-06, An Analytical Report – a comprehensive survey of the status of elementary education in all 604 districts into which the country is divided for administrative purposes – published in July this year. This valuable annual report is the socially beneficial fallout of the highly successful District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) which first began monitoring primary education initiatives in 42 most backward districts of the country in 1994. “A need was felt to develop a computerised educa-tional management information system for facilitating decentralised planning and management. Accordingly the responsibility…