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India’s elementary education system is at a crossroads. In 2009, the Indian Parliament passed the Right to Education (RTE) Act guaranteeing the provision of free and compulsory education to all children between the ages of 6 to 14 years. At the heart of the law is a guarantee to ensure ‘age-appropriate mainstreaming’ for all children.  In other words, the Act is a guarantee that every child in India acquires skills and knowledge appropriate to her age. Now, as efforts to deliver on this guarantee gain ground, the country faces an important choice: should elementary education be delivered through the current model that focuses on the expansion of schooling through a top-down, centralized delivery system? Or should we use the RTE as an opportunity to fundamentally alter the current system and create a bottom-up delivery model that builds on an understanding of children’s learning needs and privileges accountability for learning rather than schooling?

For decades, the primary goal of the Indian government’s elementary education policy has been to create a universal elementary education system by expanding schooling through inputs. Substantial finances have been provided to meet this goal. Between 2007-08 and 2009-10, India’s elementary education budget increased from Rs. 68,710 to Rs. 97,255 crore in 2009-10.[2]

Most of this money has been used to build school-level inputs through a large education bureaucracy controlled and managed by state and central governments. To illustrate, PAISA analyzed the elementary education budgets of 7 states in the country for 2009-10 and 2010-11 (see Table 1 below for a state by state analysis).  According to PAISA, on average, 77% of the education budget is invested in teachers and management costs. All critical teacher-related decision-making, for instance hiring or salary payment, lies with the state administration.[3] Following teachers, the next largest investment is on the creation of school infrastructure – 15% of the budget. Funds for infrastructure development are often channeled to schools; however, key decisions related to sanctions and procurement are taken by the district. Importantly, while a school can demand infrastructure funds, it has no decision-making power over the timing of receipt of these funds and de-facto funds have to be spent based on priorities set by the state and district administration.  Interventions aimed directly at children, such as the provision of free textbooks and uniforms and addressing the problem of out of school children, account for just 7% of the total investment.

Table 1.  Breakdown of elementary education budgets in 7 states

Interwoven in this top-down system is an intent to involve parents in decision-making. In 2001, the Government of India (GOI) launched the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan ((SSA), now the programmatic vehicle for the delivery of the RTE) with a mandate that expenditure decisions be taken based on plans made at the school level through Village Education Committees (VEC). These plans are then aggregated at the district and state levels. Drawing on this model, the RTE mandates the creation of School Management Committees (SMCs) tasked with similar responsibilities. Despite this bottom-up planning structure, the centralized delivery system has disempowered these committees and in fact created disincentives for parental participation in a number of ways:

First, teachers, as pointed out already, are not accountable to SMCs.

Second, committees have spending powers over very little money. In 2010-11, committees had spending powers over just about 5% of SSA funds. Even these funds are expected to be spent based on norms set by GOI. So, if a school wants to spend more than the norm on, say, purchasing teacher material or if a school wants to invest more in improving children’s reading capabilities by dipping in to its maintenance fund – it can’t. Table 2 below offers an illustrative example from Hyderabad of the different activities over which an SMC can actually take decisions.

Third, governance inefficiencies further curtail SMC powers. As PAISA has repeatedly pointed out, school grants rarely reach schools before October (the PAISA district studies found that on average school grants reach school bank accounts toward the end of September/early October). These delays in fund flows mean that needs at the school often remain unmet owing to lack of money. More worryingly, PAISA found that in many districts, expenditures even for school grants are based on formal or informal orders received from district and block officials. Consequently, often monies are spent without adequate consideration to school needs.

In essence, SSA has promoted a bottom-up delivery system with no bottom-up control or decision-making power. The result is thus a de-facto centralized, top-down system.

Table 2.  Activities for which SMCs in Hyderabad city can take decisions

The shift towards enhancing learning requires that the system focus on the needs of individual schools and children. GOI has argued that implementing the RTE requires a system that recognizes ‘the need for the creation of capacity within the education system and the school for addressing the diversified learning needs of different groups of children who are now in the school system.’[4]

School Management Committees hold the key to implementing such a decentralized structure. The first and most critical step therefore in the shift from schooling to learning will be to empower school management committees. There are three immediate reform measures that could be implemented to achieve this goal:

1. Moving away from the current norm-based funding system for SMCs to an untied block grant structure that would enable the school to take spending decisions based on its own felt needs. The quantum of the grant could be determined on the basis of per-child enrollment in schools, thus linking grant amounts with school-specific characteristics.
2. Strengthening planning capacity through focused community level trainings. With the launch of RTE, budgets for community training have been significantly enhanced. However, for the moment, much of this money remains unspent as training is not priority. Prioritizing training and developing innovative methods to build planning capacity at the SMC level is essential.
3. Strengthening transparency and monitoring. A transparent tracking system holds the key to a strong, accountable decentralized system of delivery. Building structure to ensure real time tracking of finances is thus critical.

Will this lead to more learning for schoolchildren? At the very least, such a system will serve to strengthen parent engagement and ownership with the school and encourage accountability to parents. This is a critical first step.

[1] Director, Accountability Initiative, Centre for Policy Research. This is a summary version of a longer introduction to the PAISA District Studies, 2011. For those interested, the study is available on the following link: www.accountabilityindia.in

[2] Ministry of Human Resource Development (2011) ‘Analysis of Budgeted Expenditure on Education 2007-08 to 2009-10’, Statement No. 7, Plan and Non-Plan Budgeted Expenditure on Elementary Education (Revenue Account), www.education.nic.in/planbudget/ABE-2007-10.pdf

[3] Some states like Bihar and Madhya Pradesh experimented with decentralizing the hiring process to local governments, who were empowered only to hire contract teachers. However, even here all critical decisions related to salaries and regularization remained with the administration.

[4] Ministry of Human Resource Development (2011), ‘ Sarva ShIksha Abhiyan: Framework of Implementation’

In December, Bihar is cold and Nalanda even colder. The fog doesn’t lift till 10.30am and the sun’s warming rays disappear at 5.30pm, heralding the start of a bitter, 3-6 degree chill that lasts for the next fifteen hours or so. Along the roads, cows are blanketed with roughly sewn together vegetable sacks while horses stand shivering uncontrollably. Indoors, there is respite from the wind but not from the cold and with frequent power cuts, even those wealthy enough to be able to access hot water have to go without. If the weather wasn’t bad enough, the 2011 PAISA survey revealed that while the district has been focusing on infrastructure and inputs (building more school toilets and maintaining high levels of training for its teachers), it has some of the highest teacher and classroom to pupil ratios (1:50) in our 9 district study, only 50% of enrolled children attend school on a given day, 50% of funds actually arrive in schools and of these funds, only 50% are spent. Perhaps it is not surprising then that between 09/10 and 10/11, ASER reported that learning levels had fallen on average by 10 percentage points in the district.

The purpose of my trip was to acquaint myself with schools in the district and to meet officials, in order to understand their perspectives on the gains that had been made over the last few years, the challenges they faced and how they thought existing issues could be resolved.  My selection criteria for 6 schools was simple – two good schools and two bad (as determined by Pratham agents on the ground), one far from a main road and one that was caste based. The good ones felt lively – there was an energy in the children, the staff seemed proactive and registers and financial records were well kept and organized. The bad were awful – crumbling buildings, a dearth of children even at midday (approx 30% attendance), absent teachers (4 out of 5 in one case) and angry SMC members who sought us out in the school and vented their frustration with both the headmaster and the block level officials.

The remote school was around 8km from a main road but accessible only along a poorly maintained dirt track across open fields. Making our way in our 4×4, we ended up picking up teachers on their way to school. Even with the benefit of our ad hoc shuttle service the school only opened its gates at 10.30, half an hour after it was supposed to have started. Finally, the caste specific school we visited was for Mahadalits; two classrooms in one of the most ‘kaccha’ buildings I have ever seen – exposed bricks and cement, corrugated steel sheets crudely placed over the top, knocked through holes in the walls for windows and the flimsiest of rugs on a dirt floor for the children. And this was considered to be progress as six months back there hadn’t even been a school here with children being taught under the open sky.

Everyone I met with was unanimous in their identification of the key problems. The first for all of them was about the number of teachers available. At school level, one HM said that of the 100 schools in the block only 4-5 had adequate numbers of teachers while in another instance, we found 3 teachers teaching 8 classes. As for block officials, they lamented that while they needed 400 more teachers, their budgets only allowed them an additional 50. And even though the latest state wide teacher recruitment drive was underway to try and fill the gap of 300,000 required teachers, most of those we met believed not more than 100,000 could be afforded or would pass the examinations.

The second issue was student absenteeism. The majority of the schools I visited had 30-45% attendance on the day and even that was built up to between 11.30 and noon before dropping away drastically after the Mid-Day-Meal (MDM). The headmaster at the Mahadalit school believed parents did not appreciate the value of education and only sent their children for the MDM, the money parents receive for their child’s attendance and to steal teacher learning materials – an attitude mirrored by the District Education Officer who was keen to implement more awareness raising campaigns. Other SSA officials were not surprised, pointing to the non-existent enforcement mechanisms in the RTE that suggests the state – not parents – should be responsible for sending children to school. Lastly, a new reason I had not come across before – the issue of dual enrolment of children in both government and private schools. The high regard in which the government’s Jawahar Navodiya Schools are held by parents, alongside the fact that only children attending government schools can sit the competitive examinations to get in compel parents to enroll their children in both school types, send them just to the private schools and then have them sit the exams, giving them an advantage over the government educated kids.

The final issue is teacher absenteeism. What surprised me was the candor with which it was raised by teachers and headmasters themselves. However, they never suggested that teachers absconded but explained that the burden of official requirements was so great that of twenty teaching days in the month, they would be busy doing non-teaching duties for up to six of them. When pressed for examples, they cited roles such as being  ‘booth-level officers’, distributing admit cards, counting everything from people to animals, invigilating tests and generally being roped into doing various monitoring assignments that are generally the responsibility of block officials. As for the question of absconding (ie just not turning up), I found Mukhiyas sympathizing with the cause of the teachers, who felt this was inevitable if “the government really expected them to provide for their families on Rs7000 per month”. When I put this argument to the DEO, he responded that the salary was adequate though too many teachers were only in teaching for the money, not the kids and it was this that needed to be tackled.

Most commentators acknowledge Bihar has come a long way in the last few years: better roads, the re-establishment of the rule of law, more motivated bureaucratic machinery, massive investment in infrastructure programmes and the re-establishment of Bihari pride amongst its people. Arun Sinha’s recent book ‘Nitish Kumar and the rise of Bihar’ attributes much of the success to prioritization at the state level with the Chief Minister choosing to focus on 4 key areas: law and order, roads, healthcare and education. As pressure is maintained into the Chief Minister’s second term and as prioritization of the various tasks within these areas continues, let this blog be a small contribution to that exercise.

We’ve been reading an eye-opener of an article by Lant Pritchett posted on Ajay Shah’s blog. Here’s the link to it

http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/first-pisa-results-for-india-end-of.html – First PISA results for India- The end of the beginning.

It talks about the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey in which Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh took place. The results are shocking. Now we need to think of the next steps.

Two weeks into a new job, there is nothing quite as refreshing as a field visit to gain a deeper sense of the nature of work one has embarked upon. So it was that, along with another colleague, I set off for Madhya Pradesh (MP) last week to meet state officials of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and observe the survey implementation for the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER). As regular readers of this blog may already know, while the PAISA District Survey tracks SSA fund flows and expenditure in great detail in ten districts across the country, the PAISA national survey (done in partnership with ASER) provides grant information at the state and national levels. [1]

On the agenda for the first day was a visit to the Rajya Shiksha Kendra (RSK − the state SSA office) to get an overview of the SSA, where we met with two state officials looking after finance and girls’ education. Both officials we met were particularly proud of the MP SSA portal, where information from the blocks and districts, including on school demands, budget and expenditure, and school report cards is regularly updated. When asked about delays in funds reaching the schools, the Financial Manager we met attributed it to the recruitment of new cluster coordinators during the current school year and to delays in the annual verification of bank accounts of individual schools – which are generally with different banks. Taking into account the long, drawn-out nature of the verification process, the state government is currently in the midst of overhauling the financial system and bank accounts are now being transferred to the same nationalised bank. The official expected delays to drop the following year (2012-13) and grants to be disbursed within the first two months of the new school year (that is, by August 2012). While it was great to see that the government was taking steps to minimise delays, upon our return to Delhi, we found that our colleagues had been given the same explanation of system overhaul not once, but twice: once in September 2010 previously in 2009!

The above visit with officials was complemented next by the school and village visits during the ASER survey. What struck me most during these visits was the lack of awareness and ownership on the part of most of the key stakeholders – the teachers, headmaster, and parents.

Surveyor taking attendance in a classroom shared by students of multiple classes, MP

Surveyors interviewing a Headmaster during the school visit. The bright, colourful trays and charts that can be seen the background have been received to implement the new Activity-Based Learning (ABL) system under the SSA.

In one school, for instance, we met two teachers who had just joined: while one had previously been a cluster coordinator, the other had been teaching elsewhere since 2006. Yet, surprisingly, neither one was aware of their entitlements as teachers under the Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009 (for example, entitlements to grants for teacher learning materials) nor were they able to elaborate on the contents of the training they had received in the past. This lack of ownership over their responsibility to improve learning may, in part, be attributed to a lack of the headmaster’s leadership and encouragement as well: we found that he did not seem concerned about the kinds of inputs the teachers had at their disposal to do their jobs better.

Moreover, delays in the receipt of funds were not a cause of worry for the headmaster; they arrived more than half-way into the school year and he used them as and when required. The headmaster did not seem to recognise any rules requiring him to use funds for particular purposes during the given year nor did he seem concerned about the lack of proper facilities in the school – the toilets remained unusable and water from the hand-pump was not potable. Nor was he able to distinguish between the specific purposes of each type of grant (“Haan, vo ismein se aaya hoga.” – “Yes, the expenditure may have come from this grant.”). The other teachers did not appear to have any financial responsibilities and had no knowledge of the financial accounts of the school, which were under the sole purview of the headmaster, implying they were not too involved in the decision-making process at the school.

Non-functional school toilets in Kodi village, Raisen, MP

MP PAISA Associate, Swapna, interacting with students at their home and rechecking their survey responses from the day before

When we spoke with parents the following day in one of the villages about their own role in the running of the school, we found that community participation is next to nil – similar to the experiences of our colleague, Anirvan Chowdhury.[2] When asked about their contribution to the running of the school, parents stated they were aware of the existence of the school management committee; however, beyond the fact that it oversaw the mid-day meal scheme, they did not seem to know its functions.

Children eating their mid-day meal at school – the food is prepared by a community member who comes to serve it each day

More importantly, they appeared to realise neither their right to be more involved, nor their own need to do so. Even though under state norms, civil works are supposed to be undertaken by the Gram Panchayat (GP), none of the families interviewed seemed to have any knowledge of this since the matter had never been discussed in a gram sabha, nor had anyone ever come to share this information with them. The headmaster himself shared that all civil works were contracted out to professionals from outside the village, implying that the school was managed and maintained without any community involvement whatsoever.

To hold teachers accountable, to establish a culture of ownership and systemic enforcement, information is key. Pandey et al. (2008) find that “providing information to communities that are unaware […] can play a useful role in changing behaviour and learning outcomes”.[3] They found that as parents began to interact more with teachers directly, teachers’ engagement in teaching improved, and some improvement was observed in learning outcomes. Only when communities are empowered with information, when they realise and enact their own role in the participatory monitoring systems that are provided for on paper, will we begin to see the heavy investments in the education sector translate into consistently improving learning outcomes.

Similarly, the argument about ownership, accountability, and enforcement can be extended to any other sphere of daily life. Throughout my time in Bhopal, I was examining what I was seeing through the prism of transparency and accountability: whether it was the auto-wallahs who asked for inflated figures because they thought they could get away with it, or the poor living conditions in which people lived around the now-abandoned Union Carbide plant. This trip was by no means my first foray away from the city into the Indian hinterlands. Yet, the enthusiasm with which the ASER survey is implemented in the districts and the issues that arose around ownership and accountability during these three days, have left me with a desire to explore the state further and venture deeper into the tracking of the education programme, especially in the MP PAISA district of Sagar. For now, however, it’s time to contend with the desk and the District Report Cards back in Delhi… ‘til next time, Madhya Pradesh!

The opinions expressed above are based on personal observations and are not meant to be representative.

[1] Facilitated by the non-governmental organization, Pratham, ASER gauges the learning levels of rural children aged 6-14 years across India. Implemented in over 560 districts, it is the largest non-governmental survey conducted in the country.

[2] Pot luck from the field

[3] Pandey, P., S. Goyal, and V. Sundararaman (2008), “Community Participation in Public Schools: The Impact of Information Campaigns in Three Indian States,” Policy Research Working Paper No. 4776, World Bank: South Asia Region.