Education System in India: ICTs Cannot Work Their Magic Alone...!!!

What is the Problem with the Public Education System in India?

The challenges facing the Indian education system are immense, and the need for reform is immediate. The Services sector (mainly Informational Technology) led economic boom in India has really masked the issues in its educational system. Here are some mind-boggling statistics that will give some perspective on the seriousness of this issue:
1. India has 22% of the World’s population and 46% of the global illiterates. Female illiteracy rates in India are higher than even sub-Saharan Africa.
2. Teacher absenteeism rates in India are the highest in the world – 13 percentage points higher than the next highest country.
3. India has a very young demography – 54% of the population is under the age of 25. With 10 million people expected to enter the Indian workforce every year for the next few decades, if the education system is not fixed, there will be huge disgruntled uneducated population in India, and the demographic blessing will soon turn into a curse and a disaster for India.

What are the Main Reasons for the Educational Issues in India?

Poor Quality of Education: Since the 1970s, the Indian government has been focused on quantity, and has ignored the quality of education. Although the student enrollment rates have significantly improved in India in recent years, enrollment does not mean attendance, and attendance does not mean that the students are learning in schools. The repetition and drop-out rates for students is high, due to the lack of trust in the education system, and its poor quality.

Low accountability in the system: One of the biggest reasons for the poor quality of education in India is the lack of accountability. The monitoring of the education system is weak due to the extreme centralization, bureaucracy and corruption. The local community has no power and hence the cannot contribute towards helping the monitoring process. Due to this, the teacher accountability is very low, which has led to high teacher absenteeism rates in India.

Social/Cultural issues: The Indian culture is very rich in its ethnic diversity, and the caste system is still prevalent. One of the drawbacks of this is the lack of interaction between the teachers and parents, due to the difference in their social and economic background. The lack of opportunities of girls and the people belonging to the lower-caste groups in India also has a deep-rooted cultural reasonings behind it.
What Needs to be done?
Need Political Will: Although this sounds obvious, the will of the Indian government is the first and the most important step needed for making any educational reform. The government needs to realize the gravity of the situation and think long-term in terms of sustained equal economic growth and social stability. The Right To Education Act slogan should be changed to the Right to Right Education. Support for equity in education for the females and the disadvantaged groups in India will also be crucial.

Need to Focus on Quality of Education: Although the inputs to the education system (building schools, providing teachers, books etc) are important, India needs to start focusing on the outputs – student outcomes. The first step in this process is to improve accountability in the system. This will require decentralization of the education system by making legislative changes to give more administrative power to the local community, for them to assist in monitoring the local school system. There also needs to be a serious focus on improving teacher accountability, at the same time, improving the motivation for the teachers in India. Currently, the teachers don’t get salary raises if they do a good job, nor do they get fired for doing a bad job in school. Hence, there is no motivation for them to do well in their profession. We can help motivate the teachers by improving the teacher monitoring techniques, and by giving them incentives in the form of bonus salary payments. Studies have shown positive impact that incentives and monitoring can make on not only reducing teacher absenteeism, but on the student achievements. It is also critical to reform the current seniority-based teacher salary structure, and make it a performance-based salary structure.

Need to Monitor, Measure and Assess the Quality of Education: Measuring the quality and the impact of education is always a difficult thing. But it is nevertheless a crucial step. India needs a relentless focus on student outcome results, and to retool its educational strategies based on those results. This needs improving its monitoring and measuring systems. As mentioned in the sections above, technology can play a big role in improving the monitoring capabilities. Internationally comparable tests like the PISA is also a good first step in regard to measuring the student achievement levels. School rating systems can also be very useful in this process and is required in India. Schools can be rated based on not just the inputs to the schools, but also the outputs like student outcomes. This not only helps in creating competition among schools, but it also gives the parents information and helps them in their choice of picking the right school for their children. Having a better monitoring and measurement system in place in the education sector, is also beneficial for justifying the public and/or donor investment in education, for improving the country’s economic performance, and most importantly, for providing a better quality of life for the students in India.
How can ICTs help?
When used in the right context, ICTs can play in important role in supplementing the other structural changes (political, social, economic) required in the Indian education system. Traditionally, ICTs have been used in education by their direct access. But I think there is an untapped potential of the power of indirect access to ICTs that we need to harness, for empowering the administrative side of education system, and local community by getting them more involved. Mobile phone technology will make teacher monitoring, and the concepts such as conditional cash transfer programs, crowdsourcing and crowdvoicing easy to implement. The combination of mobile and radio technologies can be used in implementing Interactive Radio Instructions in school, to improve the student achievement levels. Thus technology will definitely assist in improving the efficiency, and the accountability in the Indian education system, if used the right way.
Conclusion:
The educational issues in India are very complex, and varies from state to state based on the cultural, social and political system of that particular state. But it is not impossible to fix the public education system in India. It will need the political will and a serious civic society involvement for implementing the reforms. Education is a make or break issue for India. And although Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) are not the silver bullet in solving the educational problems, if all the political, social, and economic structures mentioned above are in place, the diffusion of technology will serve as a catalyst for improving transparency and accountability in the system, and providing an improved quality of education to the millions of kids in India.
Pritamkabe

Education and Rural Women...!!!

India dreams of becoming a superpower by 2020, but quite ironical is the fact that the country whose population has crossed one billion mark, has literacy rates quite comparable with the underdeveloped countries (and in some cases even less than these countries). The literacy rates for male and female (according to 2001 census) stands at 75.85 percent and 54.16 percent respectively. Various programs initiated by the state like Total Literacy Campaign, the District Primary Education Program and National Program of Nutritional Support to Primary Education have done little to attain the goal. Further, the gap between the rural and urban areas and that between female and their male counterpart is quite substantial.

While the male literacy rate in urban areas is about 86 percent, rural female literacy rate is just 46 percent (2001 census). Several plausible reasons explain this difference. The first and foremost of course, is the way the parents perceive the female education. Since the very beginning the role of female is confined to domestic work and looking after children. The tradition of settling at husband’s place after marriage, does not offer enough incentive to parents for spending on girls’ education. A boy’s education is far more important as it enhances the chances of his being employed. Another reason is the prevalent trend of early marriage in rural areas. In most villages, girls’ education, rather than being seen as an incentive is seen as a liability. It is difficult to find a groom for an educated girl.

These are not the only reasons responsible for the low level of female education. Though one cannot deny that gender inequality is, by and large, responsible for the situation, but several other factors also work in this direction. Very often, the parents who are willing to educate their daughters are discouraged by the absence of school within the surrounding area and it is not considered safe to send girls to another village to study. However, this is not true for most of the villages now. But even in villages where there are schools, the standard of infrastructure is abysmally low, be it management of classes, student-teacher ratio, availability of text books, or even furniture, these schools lack in every sense. This discourages the parents to get their children enrolled in these schools. There are incidences of under qualified staff being employed in educational institutions. The meager salaries that are offered by the government do not provide enough incentive to attract the talent to these schools for employment. Grimmer is the condition of scheduled caste female education. The recent figures show that the scheduled caste female literacy rate is dismal 19 percent (2001 census). This shows that the age old discrimination based on caste is still prevalent. This is really disheartening and shows that in spite of numerous schemes being launched by the government, the downtrodden classes still face social stigma and there is a lot to be done for the upliftment of these classes.

However, talking of female literacy, one cannot ignore the achievement of southern states in terms of female education. The states’ performance in terms of social indicators is often proportional to economic growth. But in India’s case rich states like Punjab and Haryana have lower literacy rates as compared to Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Kerala has performed really well since 1990s in fields of health and education, mainly due to the matriarchal pattern of their society. Himachal Pradesh has also managed to do significantly better than other states in relatively shorter span of time. Major credit for this goes to the political action in the state. The success of government’s initiatives often depends on the cooperative action of the community. The illiterate people are often unable to put pressure on the state governments and school authorities, and so, they can easily get away with the blame. Huge amount provided in the budget for expenditure on education does not reach to the grass root level due to the endemic corruption. Thus lack of accountability is often responsible for ramshackle infrastructure of government schools.

Education, under nutrition, and gender discrimination are all interrelated. For example, infant’s health depends on the care taken by mother during pregnancy which in turn depends on her education and also the education in the community. Further, an educated mother is better equipped to help her children in studies. So, there is a need for change in the social attitude of rural people towards women. Also, the standard of government schools’ infrastructure needs to be raised. The salaries of staff should also be raised to make them more committed. Other states should learn from Kerala, Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu so that the goal of achieving universal education does not remain a distant dream.

 Divya Sharma

Elementary Education in India...!!!

Education is important not only for the full development of one's personality, but also for the sustained growth of the nation. Elementary education in India, therefore, is the foundation on which the development of every citizen and the nation as a whole hinges. But making primary education available for all in India has also been one of the major challenges for the government. Moreover, the quality of elementary education in India has also been a major cause of worry for the government. In fact, making elementary education in India accessible, universal and relevant has been a goal since the eighth five-year plan.

Elementary education in India means eight years of schooling from the age of six. The government has made elementary education compulsory and free. But, the goal of universal elementary education in India has been very difficult to achieve till now.
 
Therefore it has introduced innovative ways of universalizing elementary education in India.

After the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) of 1994, the govt. has now launched the "Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan" or SSA. Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan was launched in 2001 to universalize and improve the quality of elementary education in India through community ownership of elementary education. In order to effectively decentralize the management, it has involved Panchayati Raj institutions, School Management Committees, Village and Urban Slum Level Education Committees, Parents' Teachers' Associations, Mother Teacher Associations, Tribal Autonomous Councils and other grassroots level structures. SSA, apart from being a programme with clear time frame for Elementary Education, also offers opportunities to the states to develop their own vision of elementary education. It has set 2007 as the deadline for providing primary education in India and 2010 as the deadline for providing useful and relevant elementary education to all children in the 6 to 14 age group. In order to improve the quality of elementary education in India, the SSA has emphasized on improving the student teacher ratio, teachers training, academic support, facilitating development of teaching learning material and providing textbooks to children from special focus groups etc.

Despite all the efforts of the government of India, universalization of elementary education in India remains a distant dream. This is because of the persistent poverty and various prejudices prevailing in the Indian society. While the growth in female literacy is increasing at a faster rate than male literacy, the gap in the male female literacy has been a major hindrance in the universalization of elementary education in India. While the total literacy rate is 65.38% according to 2001 census, the female literacy rate is only 54.16%. Another area of concern is to reduce the gap between the rural and urban literacy rate. While 80. 3% urban people are literate, only 59.4% of the rural population is literate according to 2001 census data.

Thus reduction in poverty, promotion of female education, emphasis on rural education, providing incentives for retaining the children from weaker sections of the society would have to go together so that it can achieve the goal set by the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and also the Millennium Development goal by 2015 set by the UNESCO.