The hardest thing - Sustain

There is a tendency in the government and especially with senior bureaucrats (usually senior leaders, bureaucrats, officers with ‘drive’ and ‘dynamism’) to try something ‘new’ or ‘something innovative’ or simply promote a ‘culture of innovation’. Take a casual look at the recent history of any of the state departments of education and you will know what I am talking about. You will hear about a slate of programmes, initiatives, projects, apps and other such ‘innovations’ that the ‘..so and so Secretary started..’. You ask more and people, depending of which side of the fence they were about that particular initiative, share enthusiastically “…that was a great programme and how wonderful it was…” and how then “…so and so Sir or Madam came and then s/he introduced such and such scheme..” and that was great too. It’s also very likely that they will end their story with a deep sense of lament that none of these amazing innovations have survived the day and how whatever is being done today by whosoever (again a driven bureaucrat) is very similar to something that was done in the past. “It is the same sir, just a new name!” they will quip smilingly. Why do our bright officers miss this deep realization that the “people of the system or department” seem to get? Why are they na?ve enough to think that what they are doing “was never done before” and is “truly innovative” and even more na?ve to think that this will not be stopped and something new will be started by their successor?

I don’t think they are so na?ve. They know very well or at least the seasoned ones know, that their duration in the department or in the sector is at the mercy of the transfer letter which can end their term and stint at any department (whether they like it or not, whether they are doing well or not, whether they are liked or not) by the simple act of a GO (government order) letter issued and delivered by the office dak, a phone call or whatsapp (technology these days!) like the grim reaper. Hence, they try to do the best in the time that they have. Create an impact (they are bitten by the bug too!), have visibility (in front of their bosses & political masters) and leave behind a legacy. We all try to do it, so I would not single them out. Hence, they start these innovative programmes, stop or change the ones started by their predecessors and report the achievements of their “innovative” or “path-breaking” programmes. With a transfer and appointment of a new officer, the cycle just repeats like it did in the past. What is left in the sector or department is a lot of dust in terms of forcibly constructed acronyms (we have plenty of them these days) as programmes, documents in forms of guidelines, orders and formats for reporting, some tech systems, few vendors/consulting/PMU/NGO partners (who ideated or implemented these) and lot of memories and nostalgia! All make for a good Shakespearean ‘tragedy of innovations’.?

What we rather need for ‘innovative’ or ‘not-so-innovative’ or even ‘boring routine ideas’ or plans to work is to sustain them. A very senior bureaucrat once told me the importance of ‘routine things’ – read about it here. That is what we will talk about. Something many of us take for granted as we usually start our narratives with “India has achieved universal primary schooling i.e. most children of the primary school going age is enrolled in a government or private school..”. We continue and add the proverbial “but X% (depending on what report one is quoting at the time) of them are not learning” etc. etc.?

Here we are focusing on the first part i.e. near-universal primary enrolment in this blog for a change. How did we achieve universal primary enrolment? Is it true? Aren’t there gaps? How long did it take? How equitable have the gains been? Aren’t there groups (marginalized or socio-economically disadvantaged that are excluded? Aren’t there regions or areas that have not achieved it? Is it sustainable?

We will try to respond to some of them with some data (hopefully those we can rely on without question but the short answer is that we have achieved a lot, considering where we were 20+ years back. We have done so equitably and with largely domestic funds within which states have borne an increasing share.

I will start with one source of data that I have recently come across which has primarily nothing to do with education, is collected at household level and is one of the largest sample surveys conducted in our country – National Family Health Survey (NFHS). One of our advisors and a well-respected technocrat Dr. Shekar Bonu had done this analysis along with Arvind Krishna which was published in EPW. The NFHS collects a lot of high-quality, reliable data and the authors look at the number of years of schooling completed and compare the data across two generations i.e Fathers & Mothers (including Mother-in-law) which they compare with sons and daughters (including daughters-in-law). The authors highlight the remarkable progress we have made at a national and state level in this regard. “The illiterate Indian is a bygone image” they happily share the “unequivocally rosy” picture at aggregate national level.??

Compared to previous generation, where average men folk (father of father-in-law) had 6 yrs of education and the average women folk (mother or mother-in-law) had only 3.24 yrs of any kind of education, this generation of men have completed 10.65 years and remarkably women have also completed just over 10 years of education! This confirms the universalisation of not just primary school i.e. 5 years of formal schooling but all the way up to secondary and higher secondary school.?

In some states, the intergenerational gains for women have been simply astounding in terms of the gains in the total number of years of schooling between two generations - Telangana (from 2.4 to 10.6), Jammu & Kashmir (2.5 to 10.9), Rajasthan (1.7 to 8.8), Uttarakhand (3.6 to 11.6) and Tamil Nadu (4.8 to 12.8)?

The gender gap between men and women in the previous generation was as high 2.8 years at national level which has come down to 0.67 years for this generation. Yet again, the changes have been very encouraging in some states such as UP (4.2 to 0.7), Haryana (3.7 to 0.4) could have been better for states like Bihar (3.6 to 1.9) , Rajasthan (3.7 to 2.1) pointing to decreasing inequity overcoming the adverse social, cultural and economic norms. The results continue to look impressive across social categories as well. Across SC, ST and OBCs the intergenerational gains have been to the tune of 6.5 to 7.2 yrs for women and around 5 years for men.????????

The authors go on to analyse the data at district level, where they find bottom 50 districts where the educational levels of fathers, sons, mothers and daughters even now, are all well below the national average. These districts are curiously spread out as regional pockets and straddle state boundaries - 12 are in Bihar, 8 in UP, 5 each in Chhattisgarh and MP, 3 each in Odisha, Gujarat and Jharkhand. The authors add that in these regions ‘problems of education are long-standing and sticky and both men and women are mired in a low-level intergenerational trap’. A grim picture indeed.

But we need to come back to the success story; as we not only often not learn from our mistakes, we also seldom understand what’s working well and why. India's journey towards achieving universal primary enrollment has been a phenomenal success story marked by sustained and persistent efforts by the entire education system across several decades.?

All of this, we must remember has been achieved despite multifaceted challenges such as:

1. Low baseline, starting point: We refer again to the study by Dr. Sekhar and Arvind, where they find the average number of years of schooling among men and women to be 6 and 2.4 years respectively in the previous generation (which we can figure out is the generation before the turn of the millennium).?
2. Weak data systems & information: One of the big gaps is the lack of consistent, reliable and useful data on education. The challenges of having information from around 1.5 million schools from a country as large as India notwithstanding, we do not have a single data set (pre-2000s) that we can use to compare basic information such as number of schools, teachers or student enrolment. Any attempt to reconstruct the data available from different sources on school participation rates, gross and net enrolment ratios and present them across different disaggregation of gender and social category proves a painful and yet futile exercise.?
3. Extreme inequities: India not unlike many LMICs had the odds stacked up against girls, children from SC and ST communities, children living in geographically remote communities, children of certain religious minorities (such as Muslims) etc.. More often than not, these inequities add up - the chances of a girl from a scheduled tribe community or a muslim girl accessing and completing primary schools would be significantly lower.

So, what worked? Or what all worked? Let’s look at the usual suspects: clearly articulated policy frameworks, initiatives/programmes to implement the policy, adequate funding to support the programmes, building implementation capacity to deliver the programmes, information systems to measure & monitor progress, support (from within the government and civil society) and accountability & involvement of the community. These fit well yet again to the 5 X 4 RISE framework of Delegation, Finance, Information, Support & Motivation. Let’s try to unpack some of this in here:?

One of the pivotal moments in India's education landscape was the introduction of the Right to Education (RTE) Act in 2009. This landmark legislation made education a fundamental right for children between the ages of 6 and 14, mandating free and compulsory education. The RTE Act not only emphasized the importance of enrollment but also focused on improving infrastructure, teacher quality, and learning outcomes across the country. There was no ambiguity about it - we wanted all our children enrolled in schools and stay there till 14 years of age and will commit resources, guidelines and support towards the same.?

Government initiatives such as the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) launched in the 1990s with 42 districts across a few states, which was scaled up rather well to the nation-wide Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), launched in 2001, played a crucial role in setting up this as a mission-mode project. SSA aimed to provide universal access to primary education through setting up of schools as per the RTE norms of primary schools within 1km of every habitation, enhancement of infrastructure by adding classrooms, furniture, toilets and other facilities, ensuring the availability of trained teachers in remote and underserved areas. This program was instrumental in increasing enrollment rates and reducing drop-out rates significantly among marginalized communities.

Additionally, mid-day meal schemes were implemented (started around 1995) to tackle issues of malnutrition and attract children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to schools. These schemes not only provided essential nutrition but also acted as an incentive for parents to send their children to school, thereby boosting enrollment rates.??

Furthermore, various state-level initiatives complemented national efforts, tailoring strategies to local needs and addressing regional disparities. Even within the SSA programme there was focus to remove regional disparities by identifying Special Focus Districts (SFDs) and Educationally Backward Blocks (EBBs) which had additional resources made available. It is interesting to note, that while there were a few stand-alone targeted programmes for girls such as the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) which provided residential schooling facilities to girls and a few states had scholarships (such as Gujarat) or bicycle (Bihar, Odisha) schemes, it is the effectiveness of the whole school programme such as SSA which removed the deep-rooted problems of gender, caste and economic status of family in access to schools at primary level. Today, there is no district (out of the 700+), no block (out of the 6000+) which has serious challenges of access to schools. That’s a huge achievement considering the wide disparities we had where parts of Kerala were comparable to developed economies in terms of literacy rates and parts of UP, Bihar were lower than sub-saharan africa (Sen, Dreze, 1997).?????????

All of these programmes were funded primarily by domestic resources as Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS) where the central government started with a larger share of funding (75% for most states and 90% for NE and few other states/UTs). There was even an education cess which was charged to income tax-payers to support this. While the states continued to bear a lion’s share of the total expenditure in school education (Das, Oza, 2015), the planned, programmatic budgets came through the CSS, while state budgets primarily catered to salaries and infrastructure maintenance with little or no scope for targeted interventions.?

To implement the schemes, states were required to set up separate State Implementation Societies (SIS) with a senior officer (usually an IAS) as the State Project Director (SPD) to plan, implement and monitor the implementation of the schemes. These societies were given money directly by the center and state finance departments, after a proper process of planning and budgeting, starting all the way from districts. These societies were allocated enough resources to set up competent teams at state, district and sub-district levels. The state and district teams were able to hire experts on planning, management, data, MIS, pedagogy and specialised subjects such as Children With Special Needs, Gender, Out of School children etc.? Such capacity did not exist with the state education departments.??????

Establishing a nation-wide school census system (from the early DISE/SEMIS to U-DISE and the current U-DISE+) which has almost 2000+ fields of data from almost all of the 1.5 million schools (public and private) in the country was an important step to have increasingly reliable information for planning, budgeting, resource allocation and monitoring. U-DISE was made mandatory for planning, budgeting and monitoring of state data and over the years the amount of time taken to update the data annually, publish statistics & reports has improved significantly as has the data reliability. Even other sources of data, such as the census, NFHS, surveys by civil society organisations such as ASER have consistently pointed to higher percentage of children being enrolled in schools.??

Community involvement and partnerships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society organizations further strengthened India's efforts towards universal primary enrollment. Grassroots campaigns, awareness programs, and advocacy efforts helped mobilize communities and fostered a culture that prioritized education. The role of Village Education Committees, School Management Committees in getting all children of their community to enroll in schools and the keen desire of the parents (particularly those that did not benefit from education) to ensure the best education for their children was probably the most powerful demand-side pull that ensured the success of these initiatives.??

To sum it up, the education system of India delivered universal access to primary schools to a large extent. Let me remind you that the system here refers not just to a few policy makers or officers but the entire set of stakeholders starting from the parents, caregivers & community (responsible for the children), schools (teachers, HMs, School Management Committees), middle level managers (officers at cluster, block & district level), state governments (education, finance & other related departments), central government (education, finance & other related ministries), civil society (NGOs, private sector providers) and internal national community (UN, multilateral and bi-lateral agencies). We have studied this systematically using the useful RISE system diagnostic framework that the system (blog of a northern Indian state) is in fact fully aligned to access and to a large extent to process compliance. This would be true of not just the one state but almost all the states and UTs of India and not just for a period of 3-5 years but almost 20+ years and the focus continues with enthusiastic enrollment drives, focus on reducing drop-outs to zero and retaining children in schools. This alignment of the entire system on the singular goal of increasing and ensuring access to schools has delivered this seemingly impossible outcome in a large (considering population and geography) and diverse (regions, socio-economic conditions of different communities) country of ours.?

But, why am I sharing something which many of us know, were a part of or often consider as a challenge (schooling vs learning!). Isn’t it a thing of the past? Shouldn’t we talk about learning? Yes, precisely for the same reason. We need to sustain our efforts for learning and especially universal foundation learning similarly. It is no doubt a tremendously more complex, wicked-hard problem as here we are talking about outcomes of every child being able to master foundational skills as opposed to inputs of ensuring the child has a school to go to. To make matters worse, the abdication of the government schools by the middle class and challenges of making early learning visible (and hence a socio-political priority), has tilted the scales against a co-ordinated systematic effort to tackle this problem of poor learning. But, there is hope in our past and in this very system. It has delivered universal access, it can deliver universal foundational learning, only if it is fully aligned to it! One hopes that we do not take 20-30 years more, our children can’t wait. Their present and our future depends on it.???