Does the Prime Minister really care for Primary education?

One of the most discussed ministers within the Modi Government is Ms Smriti Irani. I looked at search trends for the last one year and it is clear that she is most searched minister within the Cabinet on a consistent basis. 

Ms Irani has been in the news either because of her actions related to higher education or when she comes out to defend the Government from opposition attacks. Very little is known about the work she has been doing on Primary Education which is a concurrent subject (Responsibility of both State and Centre) and the Central Govt spends about Rs 40000 crores a year. 

Ms Irani's flagship initiatives are Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat (PBBB), Saransh and Shaala Darpan. She has also made significant changes in teachers training. All  of these initiatives are related to solving the issue of quality within our primary education system. Many of our school kids struggle to read basic text or do very elementary mathematics and this is of three levels below their curent class. So a class V student is unable to read text or arithmetic meant for Class II student.  To expand a little bit on these initiatives -

Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat: Is planned in a twin track approach (i) To improve language development by creating an enduring interest in reading and writing with comprehension and (ii) to create a natural and positive interest in mathematics related to the physical and social world 

Saransh: is a Tool for Comprehensive Self Review for Schools. It is created to equip schools to diagnose the scope of improvement in Students / Teachers / Subjects / Schools and take the necessary decision to improve the same. Saransh, as the name suggests, provides schools a complete snapshot and comprehensive drill down analysis to take actionable decisions

Shaala Darpan : Parents will get information about their children in respect to their attendance status, performance, health challenges and entire academic record from class 1 to12. Students will have facilities of e-tutorials to enrich their knowledge

Here are the search volumes for Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat and Shaala Darpan (Saransh was a commonly available name) versus other Government initiatives

The blue and red colors were for Ms Irani's initiatives and  it is almost zero for both PBBB and Shaala Darpan. The non-education related initiatives like Skill India, Make in India etc are extremely high.

Separately, a search for Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat yields 2780 results, Shaala Darpan yields 5270 results versus 435000 for Swacch Bharat Abhiyan, 346000 for Skill India and 391000 for Jan Dhan Yojana. In sum, the most googled minister is unable to get the attention of the general public for 3 of her most crucial initiatives.

Next I looked at these crucial primary school initiatives and searched if the PM Mr. Modi was associated with it one way or the other. I was unable to find a single search result that shows Mr Modi talking about these initiatives or attending events related to these initiatives. So you have a young minister who is constantly under the media glare and comes out with interesting initiatives but with little cover from her Prime Minister. 

The Prime Minister seems to be paying little interest to Primary education and this is not a recent phenomenon. When he was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, while the State performed well on most metrics, it was an average performing State when it came to education. In many ways, the PM is making the same mistake as PM Nehru in the 1950s who instead of investing aggressively in primary education, focussed on higher education and industrial capacity. In those 10-15 years, China went from almost 80% illiteracy to about 20% illiteracy (numbers disputed). India is yet to reach the 20% illiteracy number some 50 years later. Education is strongly correlated to economic performance.