Standards of education in rural India have declined almost every year since 2009 despite huge government investments, one of the organizers of a major new study said on Thursday.

The annual survey by Indian education research group Pratham showed that the proportion of children aged about 10 who are able to perform a basic reading task dropped from 52.8 per cent in 2009 to 47 per cent in 2013.

A Right to Education Act passed in 2009 guarantees state schooling for children from six to 14 years of age and enrolment levels reached 96 per cent in this age category in 2013, little changed from 2012, the study said.

“This decade has been good for schooling, for improving infrastructure and development. But learning for all is only just beginning and it really needs to pick up momentum,” Banerji told AFP.

The survey showed 52.8 per cent of children in standard five (children aged about 10) across government and private schools were able to read a text from standard two (children aged about six) in 2009.

This fell to 47 percent in 2013, according to the report released on Wednesday.

In maths, 33.2 per cent of children in standard three in government schools (children aged about eight) were able to solve a simple two-digit subtraction problem in 2010. This fell to 18.9 per cent in 2013.

The drop was smaller in private schools, with 47.8 per cent of children able to solve the same problem in 2010, compared to 44.6 percent in 2013.

“The guarantee of education is meaningless without satisfactory learning. There are serious implications for India’s equity and growth if basic learning outcomes do not improve soon,” the report.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2014-01-16/news/46263579_1_private-schools-rukmini-banerji-education-act

The much lauded book, An Uncertain Glory, by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen carries an easily missed subtitle, India and Its Contradictions.
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…it is Chapter 5 of the book, The Centrality of Education, that truly excels in identifying education as the key to the liberation of our society from the clutches of a contradiction — an enormous contradiction, in fact — that precludes the majority of the 120-crore-plus Indians from reading a single printed word in the book.

The chapter in question presents in detail the shambles in which India has landed vis-à-vis elementary education. To quote, “About 20 per cent of Indian children between the ages of 6 and 14 years were not attending school even in 2005-06, and about 10 per cent of children of that age group had never been enrolled in any school at all. The neglect is particularly strong for Indian girls, nearly half of whom were out of school in large parts of India…in the same year.” Against this background, a cruel joke stares us in the face when we boast about our nuclear capabilities or launch a Mars-bound spacecraft.

There are no less than nine reasons that Drèze and Sen offer to underline the importance of basic education. First, the ability to read, write and count wins for a person the freedom “to communicate with others”. Second, it improves economic opportunities. Third, it adds to political consciousness in a democratic society. Fourth, schooling opens up the mind to public health issues. Fifth and sixth, education broadens perceptions regarding human as well as legal rights. Seventh, education is directly linked to women’s empowerment. Eighth, it narrows down inequalities related to class and caste. And finally, ninth, the act of studying is itself an enormous source of pleasure.

The authors refer to the Meiji restoration of Japan in 1868 as a case in point. The fundamental Code of Education (1872) ensured that there would be “no community with an illiterate family, nor a family with an illiterate person.” Around 43 per cent of the budget of towns and villages was allocated to education during 1906-1911. Japan, by 1910, was “almost fully literate” and “by 1913, though still very much poorer than Britain or America… was publishing more books than Britain and more than twice as many as the United States.”

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First, an educated worker is more efficient, compared to his uneducated counterpart, in the production of commodities. Second, education, especially higher education, opens up avenues for research on production technologies. Both affect the growth prospects of an economy, though the first is probably more intimately linked to the idea of universal education than the second.

Universal education is a concept that should target elementary and secondary school education and, if possible, high school as well. Referring back to Japan, China and the other Asian giants, or even the US, the majority of the labour force is educated but not highly so. A relatively minor section of the population is exposed to post-graduate university education. However, the universal nature of the sort of education that identifies the majority of the population lends an unmistakable shine to productive activities. Further, as Lucas observes, an educated population improves the quality of life in general.
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It would appear that post-Independence India laid more stress on higher, than on primary or secondary, education. From its very inception, therefore, the Indian education policy had a bias built into it. While our IITs, IIMs, ISIs, IIScs and TIFRs have succeeded in receiving well-deserved international recognition, we failed miserably in producing primary school teachers for children living in villages or urban slums. The result has been a gaping divide between the haves and the have-nots. Imported cars belonging to a handful of the increasingly affluent middle-class intelligentsia are clogging up our inadequate roadways even as 90 per cent of the labour force (which includes child labour as well) languishes in the so-called unorganized sector in malign neglect.
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India, however, followed a lopsided education policy by laying stress on higher education before the country was prepared with the minimal infrastructure — namely, mass-scale literacy.

India misses the bus

Maharashtra is trying to persuade companies to put money in the school system as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending, reinforcing the administration’s efforts to boost educational facilities in a state where 70% of schools are government-run.

This will leave only around Rs.6,790 crore for building new schools and facilities like science laboratories and toilets and to carry out repairs on existing infrastructure in the 100,000 schools run by the state government through zilla parishads (district councils).
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The new Companies Act requires corporate entities with a net worth of more than Rs.500 crore or revenue of more than Rs.1,000 crore or net profit of more than Rs.5 crore to spend at least 2% of their average net profits of the preceding three years on CSR

I wonder…

What are other countries doing to promote vocational skills?

How are market needs/demands going to be identified and how will the relevant skills be taught to students?

Will the program help students to find jobs?

The Centre has set a target to impart vocational skills to about 50 crore youth in the country by 2022, Union minister of state for labour Kodikunnil Suresh has said.

…Suresh said the reason for unemployment in the country is not because of non-availability of job opportunities but due to lack of skilled manpower. “There is no dearth of jobs in the country but the problem is that our youth are not employable due to lack of technical skills,’’ he said.

“Today’s youth are not employable as they are unskilled. In the current scenario only 7 per cent of India’s working population is organized, only 2.4 lakh apprentices find their way into industry and 25 per cent of engineers are employable. The government has recognised the need to train youth of the country and has undertaken various initiatives in this regard,’’he said.

He said the Union labour department has been given a target to train about 50 crore youths in various skills by 2022.  To change the current scenario, educational curriculum should be prepared in such a way that our youth get vocational training according to market needs and demands, he said.

The Centre has set up a National Skill Development Agency (NSDA), which would work towards coordination of skill development efforts of the Central and state governments as well as public and private-sector industries. There are more than 10,000 ITIs in the country through which thousands of youth were being trainedin various skills, he said.

http://newindianexpress.com/states/andhra_pradesh/50-Crore-Youth-to-be-Trained-in-Vocational-Skills-by-2022/2013/11/29/article1917653.ece