We are now entering the final lap of the PAISA surveys with only one of our nine districts (Jalpaigudi) still to go live. While it will take us a few months to analyze the data (watch out for the district studies that should be out in October 2011), the process of conducting the survey itself has given us a glimpse into the bottlenecks and successes of the everyday administration of elementary education. Here are some snippets from the field.

1. Between marriage seasons, the summer heat and the rains – there’s always a reason for teachers and children to skip school: We scheduled our PAISA surveys between April and July 2011. This, we soon discovered is the worst time to conduct a survey (and more importantly the worst time for teaching) because teachers and students are rarely available in schools!April, in many states, marks the start of the school year and teachers are tasked with meeting enrolment targets (which for many states, is the primary goal of the Right to Education). In  practical terms this means- that teachers spend the first few weeks of the new school year doing house visits during school hours. Enrolment targets apart, this is also the time when exam papers (exams are usually held in March) are evaluated and once teachers are done with their house visits they tend to spend the rest of their ‘teaching’ time evaluating exam papers. Keeping this in mind, we postponed our survey to early May in the hope that we could complete our data collection work well before schools close for the summer holidays.

   Rajasthan was our first stop. But we soon discovered that finding teachers and students in schools in May is not easy either. May is peak wedding season in Rajasthan and children and teachers are busy attending weddings not schools! And that’s not all. We also discovered that national events can also result in school closure. In the midst of the Rajasthan survey, the PAISA team woke one morning to discover that the state government had declared an official holiday because the Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh had died unexpectedly in a helicopter crash!

   Bihar had a different problem. The State had scheduled Panchayat elections in May and all the teachers were busy on ‘election duties’. And just when the elections finished and schools began to resume their normal schedule, the summer heat kicked causing the Bihar government to close schools two weeks earlier than planned.

2. Schools rarely open on time: Back in the day, when I was a school going kid, I spent many a morning running around the  football field as punishment for showing up late (not that it ever deterred me). Turns out rural school going children in India don’t have that problem because schools rarely open on time. In Bihar, to beat the heat the government set school timing between 6.30 am -11.30 am. But once we started our survey we discovered that that 6.30 am was far too early for teachers and schools actually opened somewhere between 7.30 or 8 am. 6.30 am is unreasonably early, you could argue but our experience in Madhya Pradesh showed that teacher punctuality (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with school timings. In Madhya Pradesh, schools are officially meant to open at a rather reasonable 10.30 am. But in many instances when the PAISA team reached schools at 11.30 AM, to find children playing in the fields waiting for their teacher to show up!. Anecdotes suggest that school timings seem to depend on the distance teachers had to travel to get to schools – making, to my mind, a strong case for local recruitment and para teachers.
3. Beware, your headmaster may be under trial for murder:  In Purnea, Bihar, my colleague Anirvan Chowdhury faced a unique problem. PAISA surveyors couldn’t get grant information in many schools because the headmasters were under trial for murder and their accounts were frozen! In other cases, newly appointed headmasters complained that their predecessors had “bungled” the school accounts and all official/bank documents had mysteriously vapourised; robberies were the excuse given although one wonders why these so-called thieves rifled through school cupboards!  Anirvan is now trying to figure out how to code ‘HM under trial’ and ‘school robbery’!
4. A truly mobile office: Murder trials apart, in all the districts surveyed, PAISA surveyors had difficulty accessing passbooks and cash-books (a important part of the PAISA survey).  This was not surprising. After all, given the lack of transparency in the system why would headmasters be willing to share financial information with our surveyors? But on talking with surveyors we discovered the problem wasn’t unwilling headmasters but unavailability of documents – in more cases than less, the Head Masters (HMs) keep  school related documents at home!  One of our surveyors rather aptly summarized this-: “The HMs’ he said, ”take their office home”.
5. Whose right is it anyway? What does it mean to implement a ‘rights’ based program as opposed to a scheme and how is the idea of a right interpreted by a bureaucracy steeped in a guideline driven, input focused culture? This question has intrigued me and in my travels during the survey, I asked this question to every school teacher I met. With almost no exceptions here is the answer I got :  (I paraphrase) “It gives us leverage over parents. Now that there is a law, we tell parents they have no choice but to enroll their children in schools.” An interesting interpretation of a right that was meant to empower people not teachers! This response confirmed to me that our current systems are simply not designed to deliver on a ‘rights’ framework and there is a real need to re-think how our bureaucracy is structured if we want the idea of a right based delivery system to transform citizen-state relations in this country.
6. Headmasters spend a lot of time at funerals: This might seem close to the absurd, but we found that HMs in Bihar spend a disproportionate amount of time attending funerals. In a number of schools that we went to the head-master was on leave. In each of these schools, the head-teacher in charge claimed that the leave was for personal reasons. This seemed reasonable. So we asked them for the headmaster’s phone number and told them we’d be back in 2-3 days. As soon as we declared our intent of coming back, the head-teacher would claim that the headmaster’s relative had died and that he would come back for duty only after 1 or 2 weeks. The first place we went to, this seemed believable. But by the 4^th school we were scratching our heads and wondering if there was an epidemic related to passbooks!

But in all this chaos and confusion, there are things that work.

To take an example, surveyors said that the scholarship and uniform scheme run by the government of Bihar is working very well, and that unlike the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, corruption and leakage in it was relatively low. According to the surveyors, these schemes work because the entitlements are handed over during public meetings and the public nature of this process acts as a deterrent to corruption.

But above all a sense of government and community ownership towards a scheme/programme matters most. While monitoring the PAISA survey in Bihar, Abhinav Nayar a summer intern with AI documented the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojana– an incentive scheme launched in 2006 through which girls who have completed standard VIII (Middle school) and enroll in high school are given a cash award of Rs. 2,000 to buy a bicycle.   The scheme now has been extended to boys as well. Allegations of corruption have been few and far between (there are a few cases where eligible girls haven’t got their bicycles but this is attributed to administrative hiccups and not corruption) and in most cases eligible girls have used the money to buy only bicycles – not something you’d expect. Abhinav’s field work pointed to one important reason for this – girls and their parents take pride in owning the bicycle. Girls play with their bicycles during recess – in fact, the bicycle parking-space is now the ‘hang out’ spot. So valued is this possession, that Abhinav was left wondering about the peer pressure on girls who haven’t yet received their bikes.

In Satara, Maharashtra, I came across a school where a group of motivated teachers had started music lessons for children and encouraged parents to contribute to the day-to-day functioning of the schools. Parents had bought furniture for the school – in fact this was one of the only schools I’ve been to in the district which had desks.

These stories hold many lessons. For one, greater transparency, as we see in the case of the scholarship and uniform programme can help redress corruption. But transparency alone is not enough. People need to have a sense of ownership toward a programme as they do in the cycle case and in the school I visited in Satara. How do we take these isolated experiences and scale them up to the rest of the country? How do we get every parent to feel a sense of ownership over the school, to engage and participate in the school? This is the challenge of the future.