What Ails Primary Education in India? A Critique of Public Policy

Human capital is as important as the physical capital for growth of the economy and therefore economies require spending not only on the acquisition of capital goods like machines, tools, buildings etc they also require necessary human skill to make use of these productive assets. The returns on investments that are offered by these components of capital greatly differ in terms of time element as the gestation period for the human capital is fairly longer. It is this characteristic of latter that calls for the government’s intervention in sharing the expenditure on human capital formation, especially in low income and overpopulated economies. India certainly belongs to this category.

Imbalances of vast magnitude can be observed in India’s educational system. These imbalances are in terms of primary versus higher education, private versus public provided education and even Centre versus State government funded educational institutions. The latter brings into debate certain issues of federal polity also which is barely touched in this paper. Currently the most focused issue in India is the state of primary education. The paper is a critique of the way it is currently promoted.

A lot of activities could be observed in recent years to improve primary education in the country. This includes the enactment of Right to Education Act in 2009, imposition of specific tax – education cess. Therefore in terms of resource allocation there has been a manifold increase especially for primary education. But the big question being asked is if these resources are being spent judiciously? In other words as Lant Prichet puts it that fragile States usually suffer from what he termed as ‘capability trap’ as the State implicitly assumes (erroneously) the creation of apparatus would necessarily result in the functional efficiency also. If the approach does not work it amounts to a huge west. Unfortunately the Annual Status of Educational Report (ASER) – 2010 point to very poor outcome in terms of quality as far as the primary education is concerned.

Present paper seeks to find explanation as to what went wrong in this sector and what could possibly be the way out from this ‘big stuck’. The data we analyzed point to the fact there has occurred gradual decline in the social monitoring of this sector, resulting in near disappearance of accountability of those who are entrusted with the task of manning the system – educators and administrators. Inability of democratic institutions to stem the rot has also been observed.

The data we have used for the study are both primary – though a small but representative sample, and secondary obtained from government and non-government organization. Certain comparisons have also been done with the private schools that have mushroomed over the last ten to fifteen years.