Flagged off in 1999, the objectives of SSA whose goal is to meet the educational needs of 192 million children across the subcontinent are monumental: 319,000 new primary schools, 1,000,000 new classrooms and 390,000 teachers across 524 districts. but this ambitious programme is way behind schedule. Neeta Lal makes a mid-term appraisal
Proclaimed from the roof tops as India’s magic prescription for attaining the United Nations mandated millennium development goal of Education For All (EFA) by 2010, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (education for all) the Union government’s flagship programme to implement the 86th Amendment to the Constitution which guarantees free and compulsory education to children in the age group six-14 faces a present and clear danger of running aground.
Flagged off in 1999 by the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) government after an exhaustive three-year survey of each Indian state by its controversial Union minister for human resource development, Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, SSA’s goal is to meet the education needs of 192 million children in 1,100,000 habitations across the subcontinent. This ambitious programme detailed in a humungous 659-sheaved document is being implemented in alliance with 31 state governments and addresses a swathe of primary education (classes I-VIII) issues.
By any yardstick the objectives of SSA are monumental: 319,000 new primary schools, 1,000,000 new classrooms and recruitment of 390,000 teachers across 524 districts countrywide by the turn of the first decade of the new millennium. Apart from new schools and classrooms, the programme envisages fortification of the existing school infrastructure by way of constructing additional classrooms and toilets, providing drinking water, and liberal school improvement grants. Inadequate teacher strength in existing schools is being shored up not only by recruiting additional staff but by extensive training and additional academic support inputs at the cluster, block and district levels. Moreover the programme has a special focus on education of girls and children with special needs.
“Holistically, the programme’s thrust is on decentralised, participative and consultative elementary education with community ownership of the school system a key objective,” Anita Chauhan, deputy secretary (elementary education) Union ministry of human resource development told this correspondent after a five-week chase.
According to Chauhan, SSA targets the enrollment of all children in schools or “other alternatives” by 2003; completion of five years of primary schooling by all children by 2007; completion of eight years of elementary education by all children by 2010; universal retention in primary cycle by 2007; dropout rate pegged at under 10 percent for grades VI and VII and improvement of all aspects of education (content and process) to ensure reasonable learning outcomes at the elementary level especially in literacy, numeracy and life skills. “We are targeting 100 percent enrollment and zero drop out rate with infrastructure development being on top of our agenda,” avers Chauhan. However, when pressed to quantify, Chauhan referred your correspondent to her colleague D. Jhingran, director elementary education, an equally elusive official who failed to return any of EW’s repeated phone calls and e-mail messages.
Bureaucratic obduracy and opacity in the Union HRD ministry is tacit acknowl-edgement that post-independence India has perhaps the most dismal primary education record worldwide. According to a recent UNICEF estimate, India hosts a whopping 26.8 million primary school age children out of school 23 percent of the global total out-of-school children. Moreover with a primary education gender parity index (GPI) of 0.91 percent 91 girls in school for every 100 boys India ranks way down at 147 of the 181 countries surveyed even behind neighbouring Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Therefore, to achieve universal elementary education by 2015, India needs to have an average annual enrollment increase rate of 1.7 percent for boys and 1.9 percent for girls, hardly a cakewalk considering from 1980 to 2001, the annual average enrollment increase was a measly 0.7 percent overall 0.38 for boys and 1.02 for girls.
These dismal statistics are the tip of a dangerous iceberg which if neglected could capsize the ship of state. As highlighted in EducationWorld’s analysis of India’s most pro-education Union Budget ever (EW April), per capita public expenditure (Centre plus states) per child (below 18 years of age) in contemporary India is a mere Rs.2,940 per year ($65) against Britain’s $7,015. Unsurprisingly a huge education infrastructure backlog has accumulated. One fifth of government primary schools (90 percent of the total 933,000) are multi-grade teaching institutions; 20 percent don’t have proper buildings and minimal class furniture; 58 percent can’t provide drinking water and 70 percent lack toilet and sanitation facilities. Little wonder that a record 53 percent of all children who enroll in primary school, drop out before they reach class VIII” a horrifying statistic outed earlier this year which has prompted prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh to accord SSA the status of a national mission.
SSA which provides for a graduated cost sharing between the Centre and state governments beginning with a 85:15 fund-sharing arrangement during the Ninth Plan period (1997-2002), envisages a 75:25 sharing arrangement during the Tenth Plan (2002-07) and 50:50 thereafter, was flagged off in 1999 with an allocation of Rs.1,300 crore. Though proclaimed as a good start, the Tapas Mazumdar Committee constituted in 1997, to examine the financial implications of universal elementary education, concluded that an additional Rs.137,000 crore apart from the sum of Rs.60,000 crore that the Centre has pledged over a period of 10 years towards the programme, would be required to realise the SSA goals. Though on first reading the additional investment of Rs.137,000 crore prescribed by the Mazumdar Committee seems gargantuan, it calculated that it would require a revenue mobilisation effort equivalent to a mere 0.97 percent of GDP annually.
The Union Budget 2005-06 presented to Parliament on February 28 by finance minister P. Chidambaram took an important step forward in this direction. Giving education top billing, the FM allotted Rs.7,156 crore for SSA (up from last year’s Rs.5,000 crore) from the aggregate Central government outlay of Rs.18,837 crore for education. “These allocations re-inforce the government’s commitment to ensure quality education for India’s children, as detailed in the government’s CMP (Common Minimum Programme),” says B.S. Baswan, secretary (secondary and higher education) in the Union HRD ministry. “This read with the introduction of a 2 percent cess on all Central government taxes last year is a measure of this government’s commitment to elementary education and SSA in particular.”
But while government officials are expected to sing hosannas to government initiatives and policy, there’s no denying that the budgeted 50 percent jump in the allocation for SSA in 2005-06 reflects a new-found determination to address the manifestly evident injustices which are a glaring feature of the lop-sided Indian education system. Moreover HRD ministry officials derive considerable satisfaction from the fact that the national outlay for education in 2005-06 has risen to 4 percent of GDP and that the UPA government’s CMP has committed it to raise it to 6 percent of GDP. However knowledgeable educationists opine that it’s not quantitative but qualitative spending that’s important. “In fact none of the countries which have achieved high literacy rates in the post-war era spend such high proportions of GDP on education,” says Dr. Vandana Shiva, founder of Navdanya, a Delhi-based NGO and a visiting professor at Harvard University. According to Shiva, China’s outlay is only 2.6 percent of GDP for education, Japan’s 3.8 percent and South Korea’s 3.2 percent.
Nevertheless given the appalling statistics which are a defining feature of primary education in India (see box p.52) there is overwhelming support for SSA. “The scheme is well-intentioned and addresses the needs of underprivileged children directly. It’s like a school going to a child rather than waiting for the latter to come to it,” opines social activist Brinda Karat, vice-president, All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), the women’s wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and now its first woman politburo member. “SSA offers a good framework which allows flexibility to adopt cost-effective and innovative strategies to bring children under the Education for All umbrella at the grassroots level. Now with higher allocations, the programme should move full steam ahead.”
Such optimism is reflective of tax-and-spend Left ideology rather than warranted. Five years after the launch of SSA and at the halfway stage, the initiative is way behind schedule. And though Union HRD officials are cagey about quantifying achievements, according to this correspondent’s sources, of the 1,000,000 new classrooms scheduled to be added to India’s eduscape by 2007, only 300,000 are ready of which a third are only semi-functional (much of the infrastructure is missing). Likewise against the target of 390,000 teachers only 165,000 (65,000 of them para or semi-qualified teachers) have been recruited. Also, of the 319,000 new primary schools to be constructed, only 173,000 had been registered until December 2004. Comments R. Govinda, senior fellow at the Delhi-based National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA): “Unless we reform the delivery system, larger allocations will have negligible impact. In a heterogenous, sloth-ridden system, more money seldom translates into project success.”
According to Govinda, schemes like SSA which rely heavily on Centre-state synergy usually don’t deliver for the simple reason that education is nowhere near the top of politicians agendas. More so since such projects involve the absolute poor 35 percent of people who live below the poverty line whose voices don’t carry any weight. “Incremental allocations into SSA won’t work because a strong collective political will for upgrading the education system is conspicuously missing unlike say, China which has managed to achieve 90 percent literacy due to consistent education policies and long-term vision of its leaders,” says Govinda.
This pessimism is probably rooted in a recent pan-India NIEPA survey, which has got the goat of many government officials. The survey highlights the abysmal conditions which are normative in government-run primary schools five years after the launch of SSA. It reveals that in 2003-04, most government-run schools across India didn’t even have toilets for girl students with Bihar and Chattisgarh featuring at the bottom of the pyramid with a mere 3.5 percent of schools in these states featuring this essential facility.
Likewise an educational survey conducted by the celebrated Mumbai-based NGO Pratham, highlights that 60 percent of government primary schools don’t have libraries and 35 percent of primary and 17 percent of upper primary schools are without blackboards. Shockingly, 35 percent of primary schools don’t have any furniture, not even mats to roll out on the floors while 40 percent of primary and 25 percent upper primary schools are always short of chalk.
“By setting a unifocal agenda” of improving enrollment percentages and herding kids into schools the government has overlooked an important prerequisite. Lack of infrastructure is the major cause of children, especially girl students, dropping out of schools in large numbers,” explains S.N. Dixit, erstwhile president of the Government School Teachers Association (GSTA).
The NIEPA report also states that most state governments failed to install even a single water tap in their schools in 2003-04. Not surprisingly drinking water is available in only 51 percent of schools in Andhra Pradesh while 20 percent of Bihar’s primary students are attending schools without a single blackboard! And, while rising enrollment statistics (varying between 60-70 percent) may make the government school registers look good, who hasn’t heard of government school attendance registers being fudged? According to NIEPA, in Bihar, of 100 children enrolled in class I, only 33 make it to class V. Similarly, only 6.28 lakh out of 11 lakh students enrolled in class V reach class VI. The situation is only marginally better in Rajasthan where 42 percent of students enrolled in class I reached class V a dropout percentage of 58.
“The government is peddling sub-standard education under the garb of SSA,” charges Ambarish Rai, national organiser, National Alliance for Right to Education and Equity (NAFRE), an umbrella organisation of 2,400 NGOs in 15 states which has lobbied hard for universalisation of elementary education. “As being implemented, SSA is eroding the formal school structure and lowering the quality bar in primary education. The thousands of ill-qualified para teachers employed have no loyalty or accountability towards the system, the infrastructure is abysmal and there’s no security for girl students.”
Yet perhaps the greatest infirmity of SSA is that even though half the time period for the attainment of its ambitious goals has elapsed, the programme implementation agencies the educracy in the Central and state governments are yet to exhibit any urgency in the matter of attaining its goals. In Delhi’s 960-plus government schools, for instance, teacher vacancies have remained unfilled much to the embarrassment of Delhi’s education minister, Arvinder Singh Lovely. On March 31, of 6,463 posts of postgraduate teachers, 318 were vacant while against 19,932 posts of trained graduate teachers 2,603 were vacant besides 936 other vacancies.
Unsurprisingly, the large number of teacher vacancies (attenuated by bribes demanding/ negotiating educrats) has resulted in state governments resorting to short cut measures such as recruiting para or under-qualified teachers who are paid a fraction of prescribed salaries. This further dumbs down the already sub-standard quality of education dispensed to the poor in government schools.
Moreover teachers reluctance to undergo training for upgradation of skills is getting to be a huge problem. Comments a Maharashtra Prathmik Shikshan Parishad (the implementing agency of the SSA) spokesperson: “Teachers are unwilling to attend training courses because they dont want to give up their free time and holidays. These kinds of problems have prevented us from utilising our grants to the optimal level.” Faced with implementation problems, only Rs.784 crore out of a total of Rs.902 crore allotted by the Centre to the state for SSA could be utilised last year (2004-05).
There’s an echo of this complaint down south in Tamil Nadu. Though T.K. Ramachandran, state project director, SSA is “happy” with the state’s progress in implementing the programme, he feels there is room for considerable improvement of pedagogies. “We have to work towards improving the quality of teaching to enhance achievement levels, especially in maths and English,” he says. “This means we have to shift from batch training of teachers to impart direct customised training via Edusat.”
Another neglected detail which is hindering the attainment of SSA goals is that although the programme pays attention to education of the girl child through a “gender-sensitive and gender-inclusive curriculum”, it turns a Nelson’s eye to ground level enablement. Apart from schools woefully deficient in basic amenities like separate toilets for girl children, sexual harassment of females in, and on the way to school is becoming increasingly common. In Delhi, for instance, three cases of rape (one by a principal and the other two by senior teachers) in government schools have been reported recently, highlighting the lack of safety for girl students.
“Maintaining quality is our biggest challenge…”
Excerpts from an interview with Bhartendra Singh Baswan, secretary (secondary & higher education), Union ministry of HRD who took charge on July 1, 2004.
Can you explain the complex administrative structure of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA)?
SSA is a holistic and comprehensive programme given the status of a national mission and headed by the prime minister himself. This is followed by the second rung of the pyramid — the secretariat of the Union ministry of HRD followed by the state missions where state education departments implement SSA schemes. In the states, the programme is presided by a project director. At the next step, the programme is further broken down at the sub-district level and finally at the village and cluster levels.
Given the intricate nature of the hierarchy, how does the Centre-state synergy work?
Because of its decentralised and participative approach, SSA begins with a district plan which is put up for the Centre’s approval. The plan could deal with a plethora of issues including finance, the number of schools to be constructed, teachers recruitment, infrastructure needs, maintenance grants, teachers training programmes etc. Were adopting a bottom-up approach so that the programme remains a community-driven/ grassroots venture involving people at the lowest — panchayat/ cluster — level. Since SSA entails a holistic and convergent approach, community ownership of the school system has a major role to play in its planning and implementation.
What about Centre-state contributions in terms of finance? Some states complain that the funds are inadequate given the ambitious goals of the programme. What is your comment?
According to the SSA blueprint, to begin with, the Centre-state contribution during the Ninth Plan period (1997-2002) was supposed to be 85:15. This was whittled down to 75:25 during the Tenth Plan. During the last leg of the programme, the fund sharing is projected at 50:50. Of course, there are certain states which can’t rustle up their contribution. For instance, a few north-eastern states and J&K had to ask the government last year for additional funds as they could mobilise only 10 percent. Since this involves a lot of additional funding, their requests are being screened by the finance ministry. On the other hand, there are states which don’t use up all SSA funding and are left with surplus money.
What are the major problems faced by the Central government while implementing SSA?
The scale and size of this gargantuan programme is itself a challenge. And since were focusing on decentralised, participative and consultative planning, our effort is focused upon maximising inputs — bringing an unprecedented number of children into school. But given the huge scale of the project, many children still remain uncovered despite our sincere efforts. Getting poor children into school is a tough proposition because for their parents, it’s always a toss-up between letting children earn or getting them educated. As far as retention is concerned, we’ve tried to get around that problem by providing mid-day meals in schools. Overall we’ve met with some success as the dropout rate at the all-India primary level (classes I -V) has fallen from 38 percent in 2003 to 34 percent in 2004.
Another major challenge in implementing SSA is that of language. Because each state has a different language, we need special implementation sensitivity. We first have to tackle the state language and then the local dialects as well. In the North-east, for instance, which is largely tribal, we’ve had to prepare a bridge language to overcome this problem. Moreover, there are cases when were dealing with villages with barely 10-12 people, so we’ve had to craft a special curriculum to suit their needs!
One of the common criticisms voiced against SSA is that in focusing on quantity, the scheme is compromising on quality there’s low-grade infrastructure in schools, sometimes no infrastructure at all, para teachers are being recruited to teach.
I agree that maintaining quality is our biggest challenge especially because we are dealing with huge numbers across the board. But para teachers aren’t raw villagers by the way. They may not be full-fledged graduates but they are Plus Two qualified and undergo a mandatory 20-day orientation workshop which equips them for the job. Also, were coaching our teachers to develop humanistic, child-sensitive approaches to shore up student retention.
“One of the main reasons for parents taking girls out of school is the rampant sexual harassment by male teachers. But nobody seems to be addressing this problem,” says Junu Pariha, a field worker with the NGO, Srishti. A 2002 study of Mumbai municipal schools by the Vacha Kishori Project also notes that “the issue of unnecessary touching and attention by male teachers is resented by young girls though principals paid scant attention to them, siding usually with male teachers”. The Education For All Global Monitoring Report (2003-04) found that gender parity remains a distant prospect in 54 countries including India and Pakistan because “almost 90 percent of single-teacher schools, which account for at least 20 percent of all schools, are staffed by men and 72 percent of two-teacher schools have no female teachers.”
The skewed ratio in favour of lower primary schools doesn’t help either. India averages five lower primary schools for every upper primary school as against the global norm of 2:1. The basic issue is therefore access and not retention. “The focus of SSA is enrollment and inputting with the result that ensuring output — in terms of quality and meaningful learning is overlooked,” says Prof. Anil Wilson, principal of the highly regarded St. Stephens College (estd. 1880). “There is a vital link between the quality of education dispensed and the development of children. Low quality teaching further widens the schism between poor, government school-educated children and children studying in private schools.”
However the greatest threat to the success of SSA is endemic government and bureaucratic corruption. (see cover story). “SSA is an open fraud being perpetuated by multiplying NGOs in connivance with the bureaucracy,” says Ashok Aggarwal, a practising high court lawyer and convenor of the Delhi-based Social Jurists, a lawyers group. “Rather than taking on a gargantuan scheme like SSA” which is sucking in crores of rupees and requires micro-level monitoring, why doesn’t the government strengthen the existing formal school structure? By investing staggering amounts in a new scheme, the old school infrastructure remains in pathetic condition while scarce resources are being diverted into putting the new system in place. What can this be termed as but blatant stupidity?”
Against this backdrop, a growing number of educationists are veering around to the view that the best way to attain the quality standards implicit in SSA is to revive the proposal to establish a common school system (CSS) suggested by the Kothari Commission Report way back in 1966. The commission recommended common school leaving exams for all to raise teaching-learning standards in government schools on a par with private schools as it is widely believed that dysfunctional government schools are responsible for our class-segmented education system. A pernicious segregation distinguishes Indian primary-cum-secondary education served by the CBSE and CISCE from the 31 state examination boards. It is well known that state examination boards to which most government schools are compulsorily affiliated, prescribe diluted syllabuses, discourage English learning and are less demanding in terms of academic attainments than the pan-India CBSE and CISCE.
CSS proponents argue that most of the advanced western nations including the UK, Canada, USA and Europe have provided universal access to high quality school education by establishing fully-funded government school systems providing equal education to all. The CSS lobby is hopeful that with the recent reconstitution of the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE) after a decade (which has made a note of the request for CSS), common school leaving examinations in classes X and XII may be legislated forcing dysfunctional, slip-shod government schools to become more accountable.
In the interim, perhaps the government could contemplate tightening the SSA framework by encouraging a national mid-course debate to tighten the focus of the programme. Simultaneously the Union HRD ministry needs to pay urgent attention to another crystallising crisis: there is a strong likelihood that 7.7 million children won’t have access to further education after completion of class VIII under SSA in 2007. To accommodate them, 48,000 additional secondary schools and 800,000 extra teachers whose remuneration will aggregate Rs.9,000 crore, are required.
Halfway through its time frame, the SSA programme belatedly conceptualised to address the massive capacity, infrastructure and faculty shortages which have accumulated following decades of neglect of elementary education, is struggling to get off the ground. Given the sheer scale of the undertaking and Centre and state government deplorable record of plan and project implementation, in all probability the SSA programme will fall well short of its ambitious targets.
But even as it stumbles along, SSA has already served a useful purpose in that it has moved the vital issues of universal literacy and elementary education for all, from the periphery to a near centre position of the national development discourse.
With Gaver Chattejee (Mumbai) & Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)
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