STATE OF EDUCATION IN INDIA

“EDUCATION IS THE MANIFESTATION OF PERFECTION ALREADY IN MAN”

                                                                                            -Swami Vivekananda

"At the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to new life and freedom". This is an excerpt from the speech of our first PM Pandit Nehru who spoke on 15 August 1947. India was looted for 200 years by the colonial powers, the citizens hardly knew to read and write thanks to the Britishers. The literacy rate at the time of independence was a meagre 12% of the total population, with women literacy at 8%. Today we stand at 74% and 65% women literates. Though the literacy rate is below the world average of 84%, we have grown quite well to make it a sixfold rise.

Every year roughly around 1 crore students of different educational background graduate, though the quantity is quite high the quality is not acceptable. The standard of teaching has to be looked into right from primary education. Recent teacher eligibility tests have revealed that a large proportion of teacher aspirants do not qualify despite having requisite academic and professional degrees. This highlights the poor quality of the aspirants who seek to enter the teachings profession.

India is a poor country with 65% of its population involved agriculture and 35% are in the non-agriculture sector. Of the 35%, only 15% are in the formal sector, remaining 85% are in the informal sector. Education is not accessible to everyone out there.

State of School education:

The national primary level dropout is 4.34% and at secondary level 17.86%.
States in south and west of India do much better in terms of low primary dropout rates as compared to the east, north and the north east, which are the worst off dropout rates. Karnataka has a dropout rate of 2.3 per cent, which is below the national average, Rajasthan’s, at 8.39 per cent, is double the national rate, and Manipur’s is four times, at 18 per cent. The state with highest literacy rate is Kerala (93.91) and Bihar (63.82) has the lowest literacy rate.

Reasons for dropouts?

• Poverty, availability and accessibility are the big reasons why children dropout of school.
• Migration of families, child marriage, lack of school infrastructure like drinking water and toilets.
• For males, engagement in economic activities has been the most common reason. When boy reaches 10-12 years is seen as source of income.
• For females, engagement in domestic activities, financial constraints etc are the reasons to quote. When girls grow in age parents tend to not send their child to school fearing safety when they have to travel for far distances (for higher classes).

The other reason is, when the monsoon takes a hit and there is significant drop in agricultural activities people migrate to urban areas in search of employment and migration is not of single member of the family but as a whole. When they go back or migrate to a different place, schooling of children takes a hit.

These are the many few reasons why majority of Indians are in the informal sector and gives us insight how education can improve the situation.

Regional variations are far too big and are meaningless to create a national picture.
For Nellore district the dropout rate for ST = 77.04%
general dropout rate for this district = 29.4 %
For Telangana, primary level dropout for girls in Hyderabad district = 7.95%, state average = 22.32%.

What the GOVERNMENT has done ?

• Corruption in the appointment of government school teachers too has deprived children of quality formative mentorship and pushed some to ill-equipped private schools.
• Teachers are sent on election duties and other non-educational govt work and students are at the receiving end.
• Around 8.5 lakh trained primary and upper pre-primary teachers are in shortage across the country with UP having the largest deficit with 2.14 lakh teachers.

But never the less, a sixfold increase in literacy rate since independence has to be contributed to GOI. India spends 5% of its GDP or 14% of its budget on education.           Landmark legislation was enacted promising universal inclusion in primary education, paving the way for more learning opportunities at secondary and higher levels. This legislation, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, effectively made education a fundamental right of every child in the age group of 6 to 14.

A massive investment push into education infrastructure has seen about 3.5 lakh new schools opened in the past decade under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan so that 99 per cent of India’s rural population has a primary school within a one kilometre radius.

Since Education is on the concurrent list, both state and central govt need to work in tandem to improve the situation.

How can we reduce the dropout rate and increase the literacy rate?

• Making education accessible to everyone. Though Govt run schools do not charge any fee, it’s the private institutions which have turned education into a business collecting exorbitant fee.
• Encouraging girls education, protecting them from harassment of any kind.
• Innovative way of teaching rather than obsolete methods.
• Improving the teacher quality.
• Involve NGO'S and other non-profit organization to educate people living in remote areas about the importance of education and also involve in pre-school activities.