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

Teachers.......LOST.....!!!!

It has been 61 years since independence, but we still have not been able to achieve 100 ( World Average 84 ) per cent literacy, forget about universal literacy! The quality of education provided is bad.. Lack of teachers, especially the lack of quality teachers is one of the reasons why India is still backward in terms of literacy. Teachers seem to have disappeared. There is a shortage of 25 lakh teachers in the country. With population increasing tremendously, teachers seem to be disappearing even more.
Why have people started taking up other professions and delegated the job of teaching to become their last preference? Teaching used to be a highly respected and well paid job once upon a time. My grandfather decided to be a teacher instead of a district collector around 45 years ago. But now, no one would do this and people are likely to wonder what made him take this decision! A child spends most of his time with his teacher and if he/she doesn’t impart adequate knowledge and values to his/her pupils, the entire future of the child gets destroyed. However, these days, teaching is likened to commercial work.
One of the reasons for this is the low salary packages of teachers. Low salaries make people reluctant to take up this profession. There is also a lack of incentive to impart quality education. Teachers should be given proper incentives and should even be awarded for high performance. Seventy per cent of the 8,000 teachers in DU have seen stagnation in salary and position for the past 10 years. It takes a teacher a minimum of 11 years of research and teaching to attain the position of Reader, the highest position in DU. At present, they get Rs.18, 400. If the recommendations of DUTA are approved, then the average income of a Reader in Delhi University can go up to Rs 60,000.
The need of the hour is that the recruitment process should be in accordance with the students’ needs, and teachers who are more student friendly and have proper educational qualifications should be recruited because along with the quantity, quality also matters.
It has often been said that many teachers in India are lazy and do not wish to work. Working conditions need to be made more stringent and it must be ensured that the work is done properly. The environment should be teacher friendly as well. Government must increase the public expenditure on education as education is a solution to many other problems like poverty, unemployment etc. Better salary packages will attract more and better teachers.
There are millions of young brilliant minds in India but the full potential of the country still needs to be discovered. Millions of people need to be educated. India will be a country with great professionals if people are provided with right opportunities. The future of our country is dependent on teachers. They must feel responsible towards their job and help India shine.
Aparna Vya

Another Brick in the Wall...!!!

Like the Pink Floyd song “Another Brick In The Wall”  the Indian education system produces graduates who are almost similar in their skills and thought processes. There are several problems that affect the system including the proper and strict enforcement of compulsory education (The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act or Right to Education Act (RTE), which was passed by the Indian parliament on 4 August 2009, describes the modalities of the provision of free and compulsory education for children between 6 and 14 in India under Article 21A of the Indian Constitution. India became one of 135 countries to make education a fundamental right of every child when the act came into force on 1 April 2010, complete one year and 2011- Literacy Rate =74%), the lack of the reach of good education and the expectations of the students from education.

In India everybody wants to become an engineer or a doctor sometimes the decision is made by them and sometimes the decision is made for them. A decision made by an impressionable teenager would more often than not be something that would look cool in the eyes of his peers and elders. This leads to the rush for admission to several engineering colleges in the country. And having chosen engineering as their profession these teenagers also have to select the stream to specialize in – again the choice is made with job prospects and coolness factor in mind and this leads to a glut of software and electrical engineers while traditional streams like civil and mechanical suffer. Throughout this process very little thought actually goes into deciding if the young man actually likes any of what he is doing.

Before this farce of engineering college is another tedious period through school. In most of the schools, students are forced and pressurized into memorizing every last bit of detail in the books so that the schools can continue advertising their 100% success rate and attract more students. Most of the students who graduate from schools have little or no knowledge what they actually learn. Alternatives like Sports and Cultural activities are given very little attention. The students are conditioned to believe that they matter very little leaving us with a nation of talented people not pursuing their interests.

The other serious issue is the reach of our education program – providing quality education to the masses. Only when this happens can the Bharat out there be connected to the India we all know. Actual enforcement of the compulsory education is very low leading to several kids missing out on education year on year which gives no way to climb out of their poverty. Even those kids who manage to go to school don’t get a good education as the teachers at the government schools do not take much interest in the actual education that happens in the class.

How can we solve this? a large-scale revamping of our primary education is in class. To provide a wholesome education that includes sports, cultural and scholarly aspects should be designed. The government should promote inter-school activities on a nationwide scale so that these extracurricular activities get due importance. Apart from this we can leverage our Internet and Communication Technologies(ICT) to deliver quality education to the rural areas and the rural government agencies should be made responsible for ensuring that the compulsory education is actually enforced in the last mile. The arts and sciences should be promoted on an equal scale to engineering and medicine so that people realize the importance of these streams too.

How would this help our society? Education is the primary tool with which anyone can access the employment opportunities and personal betterment. It is the solution to the age old caste and religious divisions that exist between various groups in the country. An educated person and someone who contributes economically to the society would only add to the society as a whole.

Praveen Kumar Desabandu