Taking Education in India to the next level – A Suggestion



In my 2-parter on “Science Education in Modern India”, I basically concluded that nothing could improve with regards to education in India unless more focus is on the teacher and the schools (instead of creating new systems). The ‘focus’ will need to be financial, the first step, as well as in the form of a clear political will of all the political parties of the country, and not just the ruling one.

The purpose of this blog is to review the current situation, the current framework and provide a small suggestion on the way forward.

In 2019, the Nominal GDP of India was $2.94 trillion. The budget for the Department of School Education & Literacy, or DOSEL, (which is, as the name suggests, also looking after literacy campaigns amongst the non-schoolgoers) was $7.8 billion, or 0.3% of the GDP. [NOTE: The current Indian government has been pushing to report GDP numbers calculated using PPP or Purchasing Power Parity, in which case India’s GDP number will stand at $10.51 trillion for 2019. That’s easy math to figure out how much less the school education budget % is.]

As reported in my previous articles, even this budget is split between 1.3 million schools and 300 million school-going children on one hand, and the literacy campaigns aiming to educate 253 million people. A tall task clearly.

So I wanted to further elaborate my research and thoughts in the direction of what framework we have in India for the teachers and what needs to be done.

A visit to DOSEL’s official website was an interesting experience for various reasons. The first text that one sees upon going to the “School Education” section says it all:

The Union Budget, 2018-19, has proposed to treat school education holistically without segmentation from pre-nursery to Class 12. Samagra Shiksha – an overarching programme for the school education sector extending from pre-school to class 12 has been, therefore, prepared with the broader goal of improving school effectiveness measured in terms of equal opportunities for schooling and equitable learning outcomes. It subsumes the three Schemes of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) and Teacher Education (TE).

This sector-wide development programme/scheme would also help harmonise the implementation mechanisms and transaction costs at all levels, particularly in using state, district and sub-district level systems and resources, besides envisaging one comprehensive strategic plan for development of school education at the district level….

The reference to “transaction costs” being “harmonised” sounds that there is some kind of cost-cutting measure here. Despite an extremely low budget for education, apparently a cost-cutting measure was further required. Remember, this was not in a post-COVID19 period, but a period when Indian coffers were doing quite fine.

Otherwise the idea is made to sound very holistic, and that is quite alright. To further understand the focus on teachers, I proceeded to go to the NCTE section of the site which gave me the tidbit:

The National Council for Teacher Education as a statutory body came into existence in pursuance of the National Council for Teacher Education Act, 1993 (No. 73 of 1993) on the 17th August,1995.

1995 sounded very recent so I moved ahead with my research and clicked on the link to the external website for NCTE. I got nothing. Interestingly the link was incorrect [NOTE: As of 7th July 2020]. But fortunately, a quick Google Search directed me to the correct site.

The NCTE site gave a slightly better idea about the idea behind it. It seems that NCTE, in its previous form, was a department within the Department of Teacher Education at the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). Since it had no teeth, it was rightly thought that making NCTE an independent body with statutory status and necessary resources would be a first step for overhauling the system of teacher education and, maybe, lobbying for more resources and budgets. And hence it came into being in 1995.

However, it is a body which covers all kinds of teachers of education in India, and not just schoolteachers.

The main objective of the NCTE is to achieve planned and coordinated development of the teacher education system throughout the country, the regulation and proper maintenance of Norms and Standards in the teacher education system and for matters connected therewith. The mandate given to the NCTE is very broad and covers the whole gamut of teacher education programmes including research and training of persons for equipping them to teach at pre-primary, primary, secondary and senior secondary stages in schools, and non-formal education, part-time education, adult education and distance (correspondence) education courses.

Then I looked at the functions of the council and found that it was a body which laid out policies, norms and guidelines, give recommendations to the government. But the 3rd function (out of a total of 14) was also:

“co-ordinate and monitor teacher education and its development in the country;”

[I will definitely also copy over the last function just as a side:

“perform such other functions as may be entrusted to it by the Central Government.”]

 

NCTE is also the body which has the task of monitoring the academic programmes related to education, such as Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) degree, Master of Education (M.Ed.) degree, Diploma in Preschool Education (DPSE), and the sort.

To summarize my findings from the NCTE website, while it has been entrusted with teacher education, it’s role in formalized education keeps it quite busy. Can such an organization be used roll out new programs to elevate schoolteachers to the next level?

On paper, NCTE is supposed to be THE organization to carry out such tasks, but it would need a whole new mind-set to work on it. For a country the size of India, a whole new (temporary?) organization may be required for such a task. It could, however, be formed under the aegis of NCTE.

We have some of the best educationists in India and some of the best academicians. These educationists are not necessarily the armchair variety. The picture collage shown with this blog shows just a few of some amazing teachers modern India has. There are many many more. Such grass-root level educationists need to be involved in any new efforts as they will have insights no bureaucrat or politician could ever gain in a lifetime.

Forming a new body for the sole purpose of ‘taking schoolteachers to the next level’ is not only possible but, most probably, the only efficient way to go about doing so.

To shake up the status quo, radical thinking is required. The 2019 National Education Policy (NEP) got the media coverage due to its political items of pushing certain languages. However its real shortcomings were never really highlighted. Its primary focus seemed to be on vocational skills. Gone is the foresight of the early NEPs for basic education. [NEP 2019 has enough to justify a separate blog, hence I leave it at that.]

Maybe a separate entity IS the need of the hour.

Which brings us to the NEP 2019 mooted, Rashtriya Shiksha Aayog (RSA) or the National Education Commission (NEC).

[Maybe inspired by the extremely successful two-year temporary NEC, also known as the Kothari Commission of 1964-66 which had nineteen task forces, each handling a specific area of activity. It basically revolutionised education in India taking it from a British instituted system to an Indian system.]

NEP 2019 details out the formation of the new entity and multiple new ‘proposed’ regulatory bodies. However there is hardly any mention of the actual functions of RSA/NEC except that:

The RSA will be responsible for developing, articulating, implementing, evaluating, and revising the vision of education in the country on a continuous and sustained basis. It will also create and oversee the institutional frameworks that will help achieve this vision.

The remaining RSA section of the draft NEP 2019 deals with who its members will be (will be headed by PM), how many committees it will have and which other organisations it will be coordinating with. From the looks of it, no grass-root level educationists will find a place in the RSA.

This provides very little alleviation of the fear that the RSA/NEC is going to be no better than numerous other committees, agencies, etc one has seen in the past. Education is not a sector where one can jump in and fix a few problems here and there, even if a well-meaning person like the PM of a country is directly involved. If it is not a holistic action, it is as good as no action.

Hopefully when more details for RSA/NEC are thrashed out, this will be kept in mind and an effective entity will come into being.

The current situation wrt focus on education in India is extremely sobering, but we cannot afford to lose hope. Our leadership makes the right sounds and we should allow them more time to come around to looking at education reforms.

There is always money for war, but never for education….. And we need to change that!

References

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The REAL Challenge for India's Semiconductor Industry

As India ramps up its efforts to become a global semiconductor manufacturing hub, one of the most critical challenges it faces is building a skilled workforce that can support this rapidly growing industry. People may think India already has a huge work-force, but the key issue they ignore is that almost none of the workers have any experience in this industry, as it simply did not exist in India before now. (With sole exception of the government-run Semi-Conductor Laboratory in Mohali, but it is now under the Department of Space).  There are many  websites  who seem to be tracking the various projects initiated and planned for this mushrooming industry in India.  I also try to do it on my  site , but it is limited to the final approved projects. The demand for specialized talent in semiconductor design, fabrication, and testing is enormous, and meeting these demands will require significant reforms in education and workforce development. Key Challenges in Secur...
Read more

NIRF (or the National Institutional Ranking Framework) for the Uninitiated

Image
So, the NIRF 2020 was released in June and the usual chest-beating and we-are-better-than-you took place. But we are all aware that the history is littered with university ranking schemes, some notorious for providing rank-for-money. The then Director of IIT Kanpur famously made the statement in 2013: “An amount of one lakh and fifty thousand dollars needs to be paid to get a good ranking in such lists”, when his institute was ranked 295 by the ‘QS World University Rankings’. It was argued by QS that the Director was confused with their ‘Star program’ (where a “5 Star Rating” is put next to the University rank after receiving a payment), but the damage was done in India. Their latest rankings put IIT Bombay as the highest rank at 162 for an Indian institute while IIT Kanpur is at 283. ( Side note: the “Institute ranking” page on IIT Kanpur’s official website still carries QS World University Rankings as it is the highest when you look at all the different international rankings.) A ...
Read more