Dr (Mrs) Manasvi M Kamat
Envisioning the future challenges, our Prime Minister has given a clarion call for establishing a New India by 2022. India will be celebrating the 75th anniversary of its independence in the year 2022 and by the time the government’s goal is for India to be a USD 4.0 trillion economy. It is in this light that the document by the NITI Aayog on the ‘Strategy for New India @ 75’ reflects the preparedness of our country to make the transition practical and achievable in a time-bound manner.
The report discusses in length strategies for as diverse as 41 areas. One of the areas is education and the same section records the progress already made, the challenges that remain and suggests the way forward for achieving its stated objectives. Addressing the issue of quality education the NITI Aayog considers hundred percent enrollment and retention, achieving zero dropouts until Class X, equitable participation by all society segments, improving learning outcomes, and creating a robust framework for tracking individual students across their schooling years to improve employability as the broad goals of the new-age education.
The NITI Aayog in its ‘strategy’ for new-age education reports that government has advocated spending more on education as a whole. The fact, however, is that the government spending on education by both central and state governments is currently close to 3 percent of GDP and lesser than the world average spending. The world average according to World Bank is 4.7 percent of GDP. NITI Aayog has suggested that the spending on education should be increased to at least 6 percent of GDP by 2022. What unfortunately the think tank fails to do is that it doesn’t specify from where the remainder three percent will come from?
The current Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) for the elementary level education in India is close to 100 percent. GER indicates how many children regardless of their age are enrolled in primary school relative to the population of primary school age. Though this figure is remarkable, the dropout levels are high and enrollment substantially lower (around 55 percent) as children progress to senior secondary levels as per the data sourced from Unified District Information System for Education (U-DISE). Simply put, as the level of education increases from elementary to the senior secondary levels, the gap between the GER and the Net Enrollment Ratio (NER) becomes wider. NER is the share of children of primary school age that are enrolled in primary school. When the NER is compared with the GER, the difference between the two highlights the incidence of under-aged and over-aged enrollment.
The other significant learning about the enrollment levels is that there is a radical shift in enrollment from government primary schools with a decline by 2.31 crores in absolute numbers from 2007-08 to 2015-16 and corresponding higher enrollment in private primary schools with an increase by 1.45 crores. This calls for an immediate search for schools with minimum enrollments for merging with other similar ones. In India around 370,000 schools have less than 50 students and they constitute a salary bill of Rs 40,000 crore yearly. Thus if school integration is logically carried out it could result in additional human, financial and infrastructure resources.
The report identifies substantial differences in the retention levels as well among different social groups in the country. Retention rate is the percentage of a school’s first-time, first-year students who continue at that school the next year. The retention rates in elementary school are 70.7 per whereas the retention rates amongst scheduled tribes (STs) is hardly 50.1 per cent.
The learning outcomes of those enrolled in the schooling system also need improvement. The previous NAS conducted by the NCERT reports that over 60 percent of Grade V students scored below 50 percent across subjects. The findings by an independent Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER) household level survey show that in rural areas and among Grade V children, only 47.8 percent could read Grade II level text and only 26 percent could do Grade V level arithmetic.
As the Model Code of Conduct for the forthcoming general election is a mere 100 day away, it is disappointing to note that the government has failed to deliver on its biggest promise with respect to education. The plan was to bring in a New Education Policy (NEP) for India as the earlier one was formulated in 1986. Though the NEP deliberations begun in January 2015, nothing tangible seems to be in sight so far.
On 15th of December while speaking at the convocation ceremony of Goa University,
Prakash Javadekar, Minister of HRD announced that the draft of the NEP is ready and will be in public domain soon. As of now the report prepared by NITI Aayog merely highlights the challenges before the new-age education, and broadly outlines future education goals. The much-awaited NEP will hopefully help to oil the light for framing of national strategy for education in the ‘New India’.
