A massive reform of primary schooling is under way in India, funded by a large World Bank loan, together with money from the European Union and Britain’s Overseas Development Administration.
The initiative, which comes from the Indian government, is an attempt to turn around the high drop-out rate in Indian primary education and to ensure that schools have teachers. The hope is that the reforms will persuade an extra 1.4 million children to attend school, and improve the quality of education for 14 million poor children.
The Pounds 166 million being lent by the World Bank will go into teacher training and new textbooks, as well as into giving local people some control over their children’s schooling.
“What is really important about this programme is that the Indians have done it themselves,” said John Middleton, the World Bank task manager in charge of the project. “The research has been done by Indian institutions, the planning has been done by people at district level and enormous public mobilisation by the Department of Education. We have documented meetings involving more than 50,000 people in the course of a year.
Although universal basic education is in the Indian constitution and all children are “signed up” for primary school, many do not actually attend. By the end of the second grade, age seven or eight, about a half have dropped out.
The main problem is that the quality of education is so poor, particularly in rural areas. Teachers do not go to work regularly and have trouble reading the textbooks because they are too difficult. As a result children fail to learn to read or write or to do simple arithmetic. There is little point in them staying at school.
Girls are deterred from going to school by the lack of lavatories for them; so some of the funding will go on providing much needed water and toilets.
The reform effort hopes to make it worth children’s while to attend school. Particular priority is being given to improving the literacy of women and members of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.
And a special effort is being made to ensure that parents have some say in what the local school does, and that schools have a small budget to spend as they see fit. Until now, Indian education has been run in a top-down way, with a truck rattling into the village every so often to dispense supplies.
