Since Independence, successive Indian governments have had to address a number of key challenges with regard to education policy, which has always formed a crucial part of its development agenda. The key challenges are:
• improving access and quality at all levels of education;
• increasing funding, especially with regard to higher education;
• improving literacy rates.
ACCESS AND QUALITY AT ALL LEVELS OF EDUCATION
Regardless of the efforts to include all sections of the population into the Indian education system, through mechanisms such as positive discrimination and nonformal education, large numbers of children are still without schooling. Although enrolment in primary education has increased, it is estimated that at least 35-45 million children aged 6–14 years are not in school (Focus on Policy: India 2002). Severe gender, regional, and caste disparities are also to be blamed. The main problems are the high drop-out rate, especially after Class X, low levels of learning, inadequate school infrastructure, poorly functioning schools, high teacher absenteeism, the large number of teacher vacancies, poor quality of education and inadequate funds. Other groups of children ‘at risk’, such as orphans, child-labourers, street children and victims of riots and natural disasters, do not necessarily have access to schools.
Moreover, there is no common school system; instead children are channeled into private, government-aided and government schools on the basis of ability to pay and social class. At the top end are English-language schools affiliated to the upscale CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education), CISCE (Council for the Indian Schools Certificates Examination) and IB (International Baccalaureate) examination boards, offering globally recognized syllabus and curriculum. Those who cannot afford private schooling attend English-language government-aided schools, affiliated to state-level examination boards. And on the bottom rung are poorly managed government or municipal schools, which cater for the children of the poor majority. Therefore, while education for all is safeguarded by the Constitution, and a majority of people can now access educational resources, the quality of the education that young people in Indian receive varies widely according to their means and background, which is a worrying and problematic trend.
FUNDING AND HIGHER EDUCATION
Under the Constitution, responsibility for education is shared between central and state governments. The central government sets policy, stimulates innovation and plans frameworks. The state governments are responsible for running the education system on the ground. This has exacerbated problems since states have differing resources to allocate to education. It is the inadequacy of resources that has recently become the most pressing and central issue. Allocation is another issue. When resources are scarce, what are the state’s priorities? In general, southern richer states do better than the poorer, northern ones.
According to India Together(15th September 2004):“The Central and state governments are hard put to mobilise 4 per cent of GDP for education.... With 59 million children out-of-school and another 90 million in school learning very little, the common school system is not a utopian ideal dug out from the archives of the Kothari Commission, but an imperative that will decide India’s place in the comity of nations.”
The number of engineering colleges across the country demonstrates incredible diversity, and has helped contribute to the concentration of high-technology industry in southern India. But the disparity between these states and northern states is dramatic; Bihar, for instance, has less than one engineering college for every 10 million people in the state; Tamil Nadu has almost four colleges for every million people. The growth of the
IT and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industries and the related spread of computer use and application in the private sector has had a significant impact on the expansion of the highly skilled labour market, and thus on higher education. In fact, private sector education is a growing field in itself, estimated to make up nearly 2 per cent of GDP. Unfortunately, this top-quality education is restricted not only geographically to those areas where the IT industries are based, but also according to ability to pay, as the private-sector educational institutions charge prohibitive fees. Negotiating the need to share the burden of funding higher education between the public and private sectors has been a continual problem for the Indian government.
LITERACY- NUMBERS AND GENDER
India’s aim of providing basic education for all stems from the empowering and redistributive impact of education. According to 2001 census India has about 550 million people under the age of 25 years out of which only 11% are enrolled in tertiary institutions compared to the world average of 23%. And Only 60% population is literate.
Until recently, literacy, and the related issue of access to schooling, have taken precedenceover curricular content. J. Dreze and A. Sen argue:
“Literacy is an essential tool for self-defence in a society where social interactions include the written media. An illiterate person is significantly less equipped to defend herself in court, to obtain a bank loan, to enforce inheritance rights, to take advantage of new technology, to compete for secure employment, to get onto the right bus, to take part in political activity – in short, to participate successfully in the modern economy and society.”
Unsurprisingly, literacy rates vary widely between states, and between genders. The northern Hindi-belt states, whose economic performance has been worse than that of western and southern states, have lower literacy rates. Female literacy varies from around 34 per cent in Bihar to 88 per cent in Kerala; male literacy varies between 60 per cent in Bihar and 94 per cent in Kerala. Rajasthan suffers the widest gender difference: female literacy stands at 44 per cent; male at 77 per cent. One of the main aims of education policy in the 1990s was to accelerate the progress of literacy and school attendance and to create an equitable system for girls,14 as had been planned by the Kothari Commission in 1964. The literacy rates (national) for male and female, according to 2001 census stands at 75.85 percent and 54.16 percent respectively. Education, under nutrition, and gender discrimination are all interrelated. For example, infant’s health depends on the care taken by mother during pregnancy which in turn depends on her education and also the education in the community. Further, an educated mother is better equipped to help her children in studies. So, there is a need for change in the social attitude of rural people towards women and women education.
(1171 words)
(images from Google.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment