ASER survey points to arduous path ahead

THE 2022 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) is an invaluable document that surveys the state of education in rural India in the formative age group of 3-16 years. India must be grateful to Pratham Foundation, a non-governmental organisation that has been rendering yeoman’s service in the education sector for putting this comprehensive report together — more so, given the current aridity of national surveys and credible HDI (human development indicator) statistics. The last such ASER survey was conducted in 2018 and the Covid years led to a gap that has now been redressed.

ASER-2022 is derived from a detailed household survey conducted across 616 rural districts across the country covering almost 7 lakh children in the designated age group. A preliminary analysis of some of the data provides some links, albeit non-linear, with the national security lattice and warrants objective policy review and deliberation.

The quantitative bullet points of the report are encouraging and a praiseworthy strand is the fact that almost 98.4 per cent of students in the age bracket of 6-14 years are now enrolled in schools in rural India. The trend is positive and shows that there has been a steady improvement in enrolment from 96.6 per cent in 2010 to 96.7 per cent in 2014 and 97.2 per cent in 2018 to 98.4 per cent in 2022.

However, it is the qualitative aspect of ASER-2022 that is a cause for deep concern in relation to young India and the findings are incongruous for a nation that has, in a heady mix of emotive nationalism and misplaced certitude, now cast itself as a ‘vishwaguru’ (world teacher).

Since education is a state subject in India, there are variations in the learning skills of children and one point that merits attention is Maharashtra-related — one of the more progressive states apropos of per capita and human security indicators.

The report noted that there was an alarming decline in maths skills among government school students and the numbers are revealing — whereas 28 per cent of Class-III children could do subtraction in 2018 and 31 and 41 per cent of Classes V and VIII could do division in a satisfactory manner, the corresponding percentage in 2022 was 18.5 (Class III); 20 (Class V) and 38 (Class VIII).

This decline in one state (Maharashtra) could be attributed to a variety of factors, including Covid-induced disruptions in teaching methodologies and the quality of schools, teachers, student abilities et al, but another data strand is instructive. The report highlighted the trend towards private tuitions, wherein at an all-India level, the percentage of students who took such an option increased from 26.4 to 30.5 in 2022. While Bihar topped the list at 71.7 per cent, the exceptions to this increase in private tuition are Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Tripura.

The link between the overall index of education across India and national security can be reviewed on two tracks. On January 16, PM Narendra Modi addressed the first batch of Agniveers of the three armed forces and congratulated them for being pioneers of a new recruitment scheme. He added that the way wars are being fought in the 21st century is changing and that ‘technologically advanced soldiers will play a key role in our armed forces’.

The issue that merits interrogation is whether the prevailing education setup, as assessed by ASER 2022, is the most viable ecosystem to nurture the kind of technologically enabled soldier that PM Modi envisions. While it is true that recruitment to the Indian military at all levels is fiercely competitive and that only the best and brightest qualify to don the uniform, it is valid to extrapolate and note that in the coming decades, educated youth will only burnish the image of composite national security. The reverse is that an increasing percentage of uneducated youth will transmute India’s aspiration of a productive demographic dividend into a demographic drag factor — with the worst-case exigency of them morphing into an unemployable and frustrated pan-India demographic cluster, with attendant internal security implications.

The second track that links education to national security and which is relevant to Indian policymakers is contained in a survey by a US academic, Caroline Wagner, of the Ohio State University. Her study revealed that in 2019, Chinese authors published a greater proportion of the most influential scientific papers globally — 8,422, followed by the USA, 7,959, and EU, 6,074. In 2022, the Wagner study indicated that “Chinese researchers published three times as many papers on artificial intelligence as US researchers.” To the extent that citations are an indicator of the quality of research, Chinese authors were leading in the top 1 per cent of most cited papers in many S&T disciplines.

If a robust national R&D, industrial and manufacturing base was deemed to be a critical determinant of composite military capability in the 20th century, it is axiomatic that in the current era, a high quality national education ecosystem is central to acquiring the kind of technological profile that a major power needs to deal with the complex challenges it will have to grapple with. ASER-2022 points to the arduous path ahead for India.