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EDUCATION
Money is clearly not an issue because more than Rs 20,000 crore was spent over all these years trying to get children to school. Today 94 per cent children aged six to 14 years enrol for studies but 34 per cent drop out by the primary level. Findings of a recent NSSO survey on out-of-school children offer some answers. While 42 per cent girls said they were asked by their parents to attend to household chores instead of going to school, 14 per cent said their parents thought the education being imparted was useless. A majority (68 per cent) of the boys also said they left school to supplement family income because education was not training them to make money, which they needed for survival. In both the scenarios, children primarily left school out of disenchantment. This story of poor learning outcomes in Indian schools was most dramatically told by the latest Annual Status of Education Report, which Vice-President Hamid Ansari also quoted in his National Education Day address to the nation last year: "The percentage of children in class V in government schools who can read standard class II text has remained constant at 50 per cent since 2005."
According to the law, the establishment of neighbourhood schools, provision of school infrastructure, including all-weather buildings, and recruitment of teachers as per the prescribed Pupil-Teacher Ratio of 1: 30 must be done by March 31, 2013. One year is already gone and most states have missed the six-month deadline to revise teacher recruitment policy for the new PTR norms. The task is daunting — all out-of-school children (eight million estimated) have to be mapped and prepared to enter age-appropriate classes; teacher vacancy of 5.5 lakh across India has to be filled; nine lakh untrained teachers have to be trained as per the new and uniform academic qualifications mandated by the Act; 15 lakh new classrooms have to be constructed. In higher education, 2011 will determine whether mighty legislations, which HRD Minister Kapil Sibal pioneered, get past Parliament hump. Pending for passage are: the National Educational Tribunals Bill to resolve disputes out of court; Prohibition of Unfair Practices Bill to prevent malpractices like capitation fee by colleges; Foreign Education Providers Bill to open up the sector and the National Academic Depository Bill to dematerialise academic certificates.
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AS we enter 2011, having
notified the ambitious Right to Education (RTE) Act, last year, we
must pose ourselves a simple query: why is it that after more than 10
years of another ambitious programme — the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA)
— every third child in India still drops out of school by class V
and every second child junks the system by class VIII?
Simply put, this means
half of rural children are at least three grades behind where they
need to be. Add to that the issues of teacher absenteeism and poor
teaching quality and you have children dropping out every now and
then. The Human Resource Development Ministry has done its best to
push the law and stress outcomes by laying down teacher qualification
and instruction norms.