• Education reform

Education reform

India’s recent economic growth rates have generated much optimism about its general social and economic development. But has there been accompanying progress in indicators of educational outcomes? How good are Indian educational achievements in relation to China’s, the country with which it is increasingly compared? What are the most significant developments in Indian school education and what has been the impact of various education policy initiatives? This paper presents an overview of the school education sector in India using newly released data and a survey of existing studies.

Findings include that:

• India does well relative to Pakistan and Bangladesh but lags seriously behind China and the other BRIC (Brazil, Russian Federation, India and China) countries, especially in secondary school participation and youth literacy rates
• India’s primary enrolment rates are now close to universal
• progress, attendance and retention rates are however not close to universal
• secondary enrolment rates are low
• learning achievement levels are seriously low
• teacher absenteeism is high, signalling poor quality of schooling
• while more modest in rural areas, the recent growth of private schooling in urban areas has been nothing short of massive, raising questions about growing inequality in educational opportunity

Evidence suggests that private schools are both more effective in imparting learning and do so at a fraction of the unit cost of government schools. They have a cost advantage because they can pay market wages while government school teachers’ bureaucratically set minimum wages have large rents in them which teacher unions have fought hard to secure.

Additionally, the paper discusses some major public education initiatives such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, mid-day meal and para-teacher schemes. The author highlights that impacts of these massive interventions (and their sub-components) on children’s schooling outcomes need to be rigorously evaluated to learn about the cost-effectiveness of alternative interventions for better future policy making.

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