Primary challenges
Manisha Priyam
Posted online: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 at 0000 hrs
Print Email
Can Bihar revive its schools? The new report on the
Common School System has a plan. But many of the ‘how’
questions remain unanswered

The Report of the Common School System Commission
(see excerpts alongside) seeks to reverse what is
widely perceived to be a decade of lost development
for school education in Bihar. In the 1990s, despite
the attempts by the Centre at introducing innovative
changes in the system of primary education through the
Bihar Education Programme and later the District
Primary Education Programme, the state lagged behind
on all indicators of educational development.

In the nineties the so-called BIMARU states narrowed
the gaps between their literacy rates and national
average literacy rates. Bihar remained an outlier: the
only state where the gap between the state’s own
literacy rate and national average literacy rates
increased in 2001 in comparison to 1991!

The report is welcome, therefore, not only for the
gravity of the problem it addresses, but also for the
earnestness of its response. What is proposed for the
poor is not a track-2 system, with para-teachers and
alternative schools, where the main motivator of
policy is reducing educational costs in the name of
reaching out, but a regular school system with
adequate infrastructure, teachers, and incentives.

There can hardly be any disagreement with the urgency
of taking

these giant leaps. But how are these to be achieved?

The report puts forth a long-term plan to be achieved
in 9 years, but given the political contingencies on
which the realisation of such plans depend, it might
be more realistic to rely on a picture of what the
short-term deliverables are. Given that the Nitish
Kumar government has about 4 years left to go, what is
that it can certainly achieve?

The report puts forward a ‘daunting’ resource
requirement of Rs 1,54,993.9 crore over the 9-year
period, without giving a clue about where the
resources are going to come from. It would have been
realistic if the commission had appraised us as to
what proportion of this massive resource need the
state would mobilise out of its own resources, and how
much of it would it ask from central departments,
financial institutions and the urban and rural
community. On the basis of Bihar’s actual expenditure
on elementary education in 1999-00 in nominal terms,
and the commission’s proposed average annual
expenditure of 17,221.5 crore, the state needs to
enhance its elementary education expenditure at about
20 per cent per annum. How is such a growth rate
possible, given that in the previous decade elementary
education expenditure grew at only about 14 per cent
in nominal terms?

A review of education finances tells us that the state
has been spending a high proportion of its Gross State
Domestic Product on education — between 4-5 per cent
in the nineties. The problem has been the small size
of the state’s GSDP, and the even poorer per capita
availability of resources in view of the large
population. Bihar had the lowest per capita allocation
of educational resources (barring UP in 1999/00). In
real terms, the per capita allocation declined over
the decade of the nineties.

Plan expenditure on education also declined in real
terms over the decade and the share of plan
educational expenditure in total education expenditure
fluctuated in the low range of anywhere between 7 to 1
per cent. This was the lowest among the major Indian
states.

Enhanced central aid, on which the report seems to
mainly rely, is only part of the success story of
states’ efforts. Many educationally backward states —
like Assam and Orissa — have made consistent and quiet
efforts to change their pattern of educational
spending, bringing down the share of non-plan
expenses, close to 65 per cent at the end of the
nineties. Bihar’s non-plan education expenditure
ranges between 90-99 per cent in many years of the
decade.

What lessons can Bihar learn from these states? Why is
it that flexible central funds provided through BEP
and DPEP were unable to make a change in Bihar’s
system of education? On what grounds do we assume that
enhanced central funding now in the name of a common
school system will deliver the goods?

The report’s ideas on teacher recruitments need
special mention, as the state takes on the daunting
task of filling up over 2 lakh vacancies. The proposal
is not for contract appointment of para-teachers, but
teachers with assured tenures, with salaries that are
‘adequate’, in effect lesser than the current
pay-scales of teachers. Seen together with the current
recruitment policies of the state of placing the onus
of recruitments on panchayat bodies, it is certain
that a strategic headway has been made. There are,
however, complaints against mukhiyas — deliberately
misplacing applications of candidates, leaving the
latter with no avenue of grievance redressal, asking
for a cut from salaries. Shifting the onus onto
panchayats, without developing adequate standards for
teacher recruitment, and a check on their
malpractices, will end up as just another way of
distributing political largesse.

Recent field visits to Gaya and Punea continue to
frame a dismal picture. In Purnea, in Kasba Block, no
mid-day meal has been served in many schools for
months. In some schools the grain is cooked into a
gruel with small pieces of stone still left in the
grain. In Gaya, in Belaganj Block, children of upper
castes, especially girls, do not eat their meals along
with the rest of the children. Given the feudal social
ethos, and lack of community involvement, implementing
a larger scale mid-day meal programme may be an uphill
task.

But then, the report is only one instrument for
changing the school system. The wider task of social
reconstruction belongs to another domain.

The writer is a research scholar at the London School
of Economics and Political Science, working on
educational reforms in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. She
teaches at Gargi College, Delhi University




________________________________________________________________________________\
____
Got a little couch potato?
Check out fun summer activities for kids.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=oni_on_mail&p=summer+activities+for+kids&cs=bz