RIGHT TO EDUCATION: A STEP FORWARD…IN THE CORRECT DIRECTION?

A short POV by Shashank Shukla

It is happy news for all children of India. Right to Education act comes into effect from April 1st ,2010. It ensures Right to education as fundamental right. It also tries to ensure quality by specifying minimum standards of infrastructure, minimum qualifications for the teachers, teachers training programme will definitely help in improving the quality of teaching. Central government will have 65% responsibility and states will have 35% of responsibility. The act will provide for education to students in the age group of 6-14 and specially focus on bringing back 8.1 million children of this age group back to the classrooms

While I believe RTE is a great initiative there is a major fact that is not the focus currently. The biggest issue in our education system is NOT Enrollment but DROPOUT RATE which is the highest in the world. While the RTE focuses on building education infrastructure and increasing enrollment further, no one is talking about the fact that we need to control the dropout rates if we are to make a difference. While increasing quality of teachers is one step in the right direction, the main reasons are more Macroeconomic in nature and require structural reforms and not only legal reforms, it requires societal reforms not just a law and lastly it requires economic empowerment for investments in education and not just empty school buildings or an army of teachers. In a nutshell, while RTE is a step in the right direction, it is not enough and without supporting structural and implementation reforms it will also become a few words in a constitution which very few of us know about...

Amid all the celebrations over the Right to Education (RTE) coming into effect from April 1, there is an elephant in the room that nobody is talking about. It's called dropout rate. The spotlight till now has been on expanding the infrastructure, appointing teachers, ensuring that schools are at walkable distances, and so on. All this is undoubtedly needed. But the biggest problem facing the schooling system is that over 50% of children who join up in Class I drop out by Class VIII. It is not about children who never attended school -those are a separate and fast diminishing category. Total enrolment in primary classes (Class I to V) was 134.4 million in 2008-09, the latest year for which complete data is made available in the District Information System for Education (DISE) flash statistics, collected by the National University for Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA). In Classes VI to VIII, the total enrolment had dramatically dropped to 53.4 million. In fact, earlier data from 2006-07 containing class-wise enrolment shows that with each successive class, students quit in large numbers. By Class V, every third kid has dropped out and by Class VIII every second student is no longer attending school. The Right to Education Act covers children in the 6 to 14 years age group — precisely for these classes in school. So, the dropouts need to be the biggest focus of the implementation mechanism being set up.

There is no definitive number of dropouts in the government records.  Last year, the joint review mission (JRM) of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the government's flagship programme for universalization of elementary education, questioned the veracity of the government's estimate of 2.8 million out-of school children in its report. It revealed that small independent studies in Orissa and Varanasi had shown that actual number of out-of-school children were six to eight times the government's estimates from the same households. Out-of- school children include both, those who drop out and those who never attended. According to the JRM report, nearly 2.7 million children drop out of school every year.

Thus, the number of out-of-school children, in violation of the law for compulsory education, would be many times this number. Calculation based on net enrolment ratios reported by JRM reveals a much more dire picture. The net enrolment ratio for Classes VI to VIII was reported by the JRM as 54%, that is, just 54% of all children in the age group 11-14 years were actually enrolled. This means that approximately 44 million children in this age group do not go to school. For Classes I to V, net enrolment ratio of 97% was reported, leaving out nearly 4 million children. To address the huge problem of dropouts, policy makers need to look at the factors that lead children to leave school at various stages. Surveys by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), which asked boys and girls why they dropped out from school, got some jaw-dropping answers. About 42% of girls said that they were told by their parents to look after  the housework and 14% said that their elders thought that more education was unnecessary for them. In the case of boys, these two reasons were minor, given by only 11% of them. Their main reason for dropping out, given by 68%, was to supplement the family income. Clearly, if the Right to Education is not to remain merely a paper exercise, policy makers need to delve deep into the broader social and political architecture of our society at the grassroots.

While RTE has a great potential, we need to always keep the focus on Indian education’s Achilles heel i.e. dropout rate. If that is ensured, RTE will go a long way in ensuring an Indian century by developing a broad base of human capital which will further fuel a growing economy, especially relevant in the light of India’s demographic dividend from early 2000 to 2060 as per some estimates. Only time will tell whether RTE will usher in an Indian century or RTE is just one more addition to the long list of education acts/initiatives the country took since 1964 : operation blackboard of the 1970s, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan of 2001 and many other lesser known state and central level initiatives

References:

1. DISE website
2. Times of India : Article on RTE on 31^st March
3. Sarva Siksha Abhiyan website
4. Ministry of Human Resource Development website