If you have been tracking our work as we have been tracking development funds of the Indian government, you would have realized that it has been just about a year since we embarked on our ambitious survey to track fund flows in elementary education. Our district studies were based on a first crack at the data we collected through the school survey and from government budget documents.

In the last few weeks, some of us have been trying to delve deeper into our data to see if we can find any patterns in fund flow and school characteristics across our 9 PAISA districts. While Ambrish has been trying to figure out whether fund flows to schools can be explained by school-level characteristics (e.g. other things remaining constant, would a school with high enrolment be more likely to receive a grant, does the distance of the school from the block resource centre or the cluster resource centre matter etc.), I have been trying to compare the “status” of schools in our 9 districts.

How do we go about evaluating this “status”? What does it even mean? Should we look at how schools function – do teachers come to schools, do students come to school; or examine infrastructure facilities in a school – whether there is a usable hand pump or toilet? Or we could try and see if a school receives the grants it is entitled to. Perhaps, we could look at learning levels of children in a school or the school’s examination results? Or do we look at parent involvement in the school. My personal feeling is that we should look at all of these, and more. However, the tragedy is that we haven’t collected data on everything that we would possibly want to evaluate schools on. So we compromise and make do with what we have.

A limited, but good way to assess the status of schools across districts is through the creation of an index. The last two decades have seen widespread usage of indices to put a number on things as diverse as health, wealth and happiness, to name a few. So we created different indices to compare infrastructure, finances, student and teacher attendance, and teacher training across districts.

Instead of dwelling on the process of creating the indices, let me skip to the results. A word of warning though – most variables, especially those related to infrastructure are dichotomous (where 0 indicates the absence of a facility and 1, presence) or have been scaled to lie between 0 and 1 (the closer to 1, the better). Another thing to keep in mind is that different indices use different methods, so it would be unwise to compare district scores across different indices. Keep in mind the ranking of districts though.

Let us tee off with infrastructure then. The components of the school infrastructure index were:

1. Usable toilets for students
2. Usable drinking water facility
3. Complete boundary wall
4. Playground
5. Library room
6. % classrooms that can be used for teaching

This index is relatively easy to interpret. If we find a school that has a complete boundary wall, a room for a library, a playground, a usable hand pump or tap, a usable boys’, girls’ and common toilet and where all the existing classrooms can be used for teaching, then that school gets a score of 1. We average the scores of all the schools in the district to get the district score.

Satara (in Maharashtra) tops the list, followed by Kangra (HP), Jaipur and Udaipur (both in Rajasthan). However, even the best performer scores just over 50%. Clearly, infrastructure is a major concern for all our districts.

Next, let us consider teacher and student attendance. Each school was assigned a number (or score) that was a simple average of the proportion of teachers and students present in the school on the day of the survey. As in the previous index, individual school scores in a district have been averaged to arrive at the district score.

Satara tops this list as well with a phenomenal score of 0.92, with Udaipur some distance behind with 0.86. The other district in Rajasthan, Jaipur, surprisingly is at the bottom. But it is worth pointing out that our Jaipur survey took place in May 2011, which coincided with the marriage season there. As a result, we would have been as likely to find teachers and students in shaadi halls, pandals and shamiyanas as in schools. I know where I would have wanted to be!

Finally, getting down to what we think do best– tracking fund flows. As you would know, there are 3 annual grants that each school (or teacher) is supposed to get – the school maintenance grant for minor repairs and upkeep, school development grant for day-to-day functioning and the teaching learning materials grant to buy and make teaching aids. Thus, the School Grant Receipt index is based on how many of these grants a school received in 2010-11.

Here, Kangra is at the top with a score of 0.95.

Satara also does well with 0.92. Both do much better than the next district, Medak, that scores 0.86. Within-state variations are also interesting – Udaipur and Jaipur in Rajasthan are not too far apart with scores of 0.80 and 0.78. However, Nalanda and Purnea in Bihar are far apart – while Nalanda does relatively well with 0.84, Purnea is at the bottom with 0.40.

What do these rankings show us? If we compare across indices, Kangra and Satara are in the top 3 in each index and Purnea and Jalpaiguri are at or near the bottom. Clearly, districts that are doing well in one dimension are also doing well in others. A preliminary thought is that this is a good portent – once a district “gets its act together” in one aspect, it is also likely to do well in others. However, if we think about this for a little longer, we realize that harnessing complementarities is hard. Since these facets (captured through indices) are not independent, it is likely that districts at the bottom of the ladder will have to address them comprehensively to truly emerge