Research paper selected and presented at Delhi Technological University (DTU)

1. Lack of Child Education in India
Sachin Kumar Pourush
sachin.sbit@gmail.com,
Lecturer, SBIT Sonepat
Lecturer, SBIT Sonepat
Deptt. of Management, Shri Balwant Institute of Management
Pallari, Near DPS Sonepat
Sonepat
+91- 95405 47060
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2. ABSTRACT
The child education in India has grown manifolds over a last few decades in terms of volume
as well as female-male ratio due to the multiplicative numbers of expenditure that have been
budgeted to the industry. But, despite the voluminous growth in expenditure and increasing
numbers, India has failed to provide education to one and sundry. This paper critically
examines the landmark judgments, legislation and conducive reforms in the primary and
secondary education in India. The analysis of growth rate of total expenditure to the
corresponding growth in the education system gives an analytical approach to the present
research. The study also envisages the present education scenario as a relative variable to the
pre-existing scenario. Taking the cue from the periodical transformations in child education
system, the study extends to a comparison between India, as a developing country, to the
developed countries. The scope of study also considers the remarkable growth in the
education sector such as development of SEDZs (Special Education Zones), rural education;
state-wise education scenario, the World Bank’s contribution to the system and a cordial
relationship between GNI per capita to Gross Enrolment Rate for both primary and secondary
education separately. A sincere effort has been made to identify the crucial bottlenecks beside
lack of child education system in India. The nature of study requires thorough examination
and extraction of secondary data from various national and international sources. The study
suggests some significant ways to curb out the current issue considering all the initiatives that
have undergone into partial or wholly execution in the recent past.
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3. Introduction
India has the largest population of young people in the world. The biggest challenge before
India is to create opportunities for youth population to become the largest pool of skilled and
trained human resources. Considering India as the largest contributor to the world’s
workforce, that shall be approximately 136 million people and over the next ten years i.e.
nearly 25% of the entire world’s additional workforce, China will add just 23 million. It is
estimated that India has the capacity to create 500 million certified skilled workers by the
year 2020.
The education, fundamental and higher, necessarily intersects and effectively engages with
the social and economic challenges of local national, regional and global contexts. These
challenges include the imperatives of economic growth and development, the ability to
compete globally, job creation and the reduction or elimination of unemployment and
poverty. According to a recent report from Morgan Stanley, “India will become the world’s
fastest growing economy by 2013-15.” This shall all be possible due to a rapid inclination in
literacy rate or child education in India.
The schools, primary and higher, should act as an incubator to create a mass educated
population and should work with the public-private partnership (PPP) and renowned
corporate houses. To develop skill-set that can match the current requirement of the industry
as well as developing global edge. Child education is also an experiential service and there is
a significant information gap between institutional claims and the expectations of prospective
students. This creates challenges for education ministry in creating consistent perceptions and
confidence of quality.
To become a knowledge economy, we need to keep developing our human capital base and
creating mass literate population to contribute to our growth, development and
competitiveness in the global economy. Holistic reforms will be necessary to reorient
classroom teaching and learning objectives, starting as early as primary school and extending
through secondary and tertiary education.
Research Methodology
The nature of present study requires the analysis of secondary data only. Data has been
collected through thorough survey of library, online content and printed material like
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4. journals, magazines and newspapers to examine the relatively present status to the decade(s)
ago or the historical times. Data has also been extracted from manuals; Education
department’s newsletters examine the reforms and amendments made by the government
time to time.
Education System in India
The modern education system in India was first an implantation of British monarchs. Sir
Charles Wood’s dispatch of 1854 laid the foundation of present system of education. The
dispatch expressed purview of education as the diffusion of Arts, Science, Philosophy and
literature of Europe. The dispatch was later known as “Magna Carta” of Indian education.
Education in India has been broadly categorized in primary education, secondary education
and tertiary or higher education. Further, they can be categorized as
pre-primary level, primary level, elementary education, secondary education, undergraduate
level and postgraduate level. It is provided by both the public sector and the private sector
and is funded from three strata viz. federal, state and local. Education system is under the
control of both the union and the state government. Although, some responsibilities lies on
union and state, having autonomy for others.
Primary education is the education till the age of fourteen years. It has experienced
significant growth in attendance rate and expanding literacy to approximately two thirds of
total population and thus cited as one of the main contributors to the economic rise of India.
Secondary education encompasses 88.5 million children between the ages of 14 to 18 years.
However, some enrolment figures cited that only 31 million of these children attend the
school, which means two-third of the population remained out of the school.
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Data Courtesy: MHRD
Fig 1: Growth in institutes in primary and secondary education from 1950 to 2006 academic years
History of Indian Education
The rich history of much admired and adopted Indian education system leads to the 3rd
century BC. In the Monastic order, sages used to impart Vidya (knowledge) to their
disciplines for the nobility in ancient India. Ancient India had the tradition of ‘Gurukuls’.
Under this system students had to live at the ‘Ashram’ of the teacher and get the education.
This form of the education is known as ‘Guru-Shishya Parampara’.
In the period of 200 BCE to 400 CE, the Buddhist institutions started imparting practical
education like medicine, logic, grammar etc. These institutions were systematic and laid the
foundation stone for systematic education system for imparting knowledge and attracted a
number of foreign students.
During British Raj, the modern European education came to India. The Raj was reluctant to
introduce mass education system and the whole existing educational and government system
went through reformation. British increased the percentage of the population in primary and
secondary education from around 0.6% of the population in 1787 to over 3.5% of the
population in 1941. However, this was much lower than the equivalent figure for Europe
wherein 1911 between 8% and 18% of the population were in primary and secondary
education. In 1901, the literacy rate in India was only about 5% though by independence it
was nearly 20%.
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6. Post independence in 1947, the existing education minister envisaged strong central
government control over education throughout the country, with a uniform educational
system. The government now had the powers to make national policies for educational
development and could regulate selected aspects of education throughout India. In 1966,
National Policy on education was formulated and also reinforced the Programme of Action
(POA) in 1996.
Education Policies and Legislations
Article 45, of the constitution of India originally stated: “The state shall endeavour to
provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free
and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years”
Education marks as a fundamental right of any citizen in India bounded by the constitution.
As a result, every child in India is ought to be educated without any economic, caste, creed,
social or regional and religion disparity which has been enforced with many legislations
including the ban of Child labor. The right to education bill was passed in 2008 regulates the
admissions, corporal punishment and regulations on employing teachers from primary
education.
Post independence witnessed much policy which made reminiscence in the Existing mode of
Education. The National Policy of Education (1986) and Program of Action (1992) lay down
the objectives and features of Indian education policy. National Policy of Education of 1968,
1986 and modification in 1992, lead to the major legislations like The National Council of
Teacher Education Act (1993), University Grants Commission Act (1956), The Copyright
Act (1957), The Institutes of Technology Act (1961) and also laid down many objectives for
the development of education system in India but it has not been successful in achieving all
of them. The early years of this century saw the unsuccessful attempts to induce adolescent
education and legislation to foreign education in India which lead to wide spread protests. It
has specified that the examination system should discourage the memorizing but it is what is
going on. The education in India seems to encourage rote learning instead of experimentation
and questioning. Moreover, there is some disparity in assessment as the state boards have
different standards of evaluation.
The later years found a steep degradation in the standards of Indian Education and promoting
education as a profit-generating activity which was strengthened with the Supreme Court
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7. judgment in the T.M.A. Pai case in 2002, inveterate into P.A. Inamdar’s case (2005) which
was masked as an individual right to start any institution, which empowered anyone to start
and run institutions, without ample facilities, overruling the backward and minorities
reservation policies and making control agencies like the AICTE, MCI and NCTE powerless
to decide the standards of educational institutions, which marked higher level of deterioration
in educational standards. There was an attempt to stop the legislation to give effect to the 93rd
constitutional amendment, which was adopted by parliament unanimously in 2006.
The next major twirl was providing and misunderstanding the reservation policies in
education and providing a blind 27% reservation supportively argued based on an outdated
census data, for other backward class i.e. OBC, which led to the division of opportunities in
education on caste origin. This act was to ensure social justice to students of the socially and
economically backward classes by means of reserving 27 percent of the seats in Central
Government higher educational institutions for them, while increasing the number of seats as
a whole so as to protect candidates in the general category, but was wider downbeat
complications due to lack of intelligibility in purpose, plan and criteria’s and supportive
substantiations.
World Bank Support to Indian Education
The World Bank has committed over $2 billion to education in India, since the year 2000. It
supports India’s Integrated Child Development Services with several operations categorized
into phase II and phase III. The projects include lessons learned from research and analysis
such as reaching out to the child which recommends and integrated approaches to early
childhood development. The World Bank is also doing research to explore improvements in
service delivery using micro-planning and finding synergies among various social programs
for children.
Challenges in Education System
India has become the 3rd largest education system in the world after China and United States,
valuing 6.5 billion Rupees. However, the education system in India faces many challenges
and they are mostly linked with policy matters related to governance apart from others. They
include concern about quality, inequality of access, homogenization of culture and decline in
arts and science disciplines. Thus, despite growing investment in investment in education,
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8. 25% of its population is still illiterate. Only 15% of Indian students and just 7% of this 15%
continue upto high school.
Data Courtesy: Directorate of Education, Government of India
Fig 2: Expenditure on Education from 1987 to 2006
Since almost last two decades, the basic education programs have expanded access to schools
in India. But, the number of school children decreased from 25 million in 2003 to an
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9. estimated 8.1 million in 2009. Most of these still not enrolled are from marginalized social
groups. The significant bottlenecks that were identified in a study, by Pratham1, are:
1. Reaching some 8 million children that are not yet enrolled is an uphill task.
2. Ensuring retention of all students till they complete their elementary education (8 th
standard).
3. Ensuring education is of good quality so it improves learning levels and cognitive
skills.
4. India still faces challenges in providing quality Early Childhood Development
programs for all children.
Secondary education yields social and economic benefits but constitutes the primary pitfall in
the education system today. Access, equity, management and quality need the
reconsideration. In a study, it is observed that more than 95 percent of children attend
primary school, but just 40 percent of Indian adolescents attend secondary school viz. 9th to
12th standard.
Tertiary education system of India is one of the largest in the world with over ten million
students. Nevertheless, only one out of ten young people has access to higher education and
this is predominantly among the well off.
Suggestions
The most noticeable thing in the study conducted is reciprocally related expenditure for the
industry and the growth of the sector. Although, several landmark judgments and legislations
have been formed to provide an impetus to the industry like development of Special
Education Zones (SEDZs); establishment of National Education Policy; The National
Council of Teacher Education Act, 1987 etc. But, even international educational initiatives
have not been win-win experiences. However, following measure can also be taken into
consideration in order to improve the volume, uplift the quality of child education in India.
Primary and secondary education needs to be expanded, especially among low and middle
income students. This will require reforms in the governance structure of primary education,
decentralization and major investments in faculty development.
1
Pratham is a Government of India initiative towards ensuring far reaching school education.
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10. To upgrade the quality standards curriculum and teaching practices are required to be
upgraded to impart more relevant skills such as reasoning skills, problem-solving skills,
learning-to-learn and critical and independent thinking.
In a research, it is also credited that 25% of public sector teachers and 40% of public medical
workers were absent during the survey. Among teachers who were paid to teach, absence
rates ranged from 15% in Maharastra to 30% in Bihar. Only 1 in nearly 3000 public schools
head teachers had ever dismissed a teacher for repeated absenteeism. Thus, a precautionary
measure is to be taken to streamline the issue because participation in the knowledge
economy requires new set of human skills.
Since education is fairly unlike industry or business; comparisons with ‘liberalization’ and
‘globalization’ effected in 1991 for those sectors. Our demographic ‘dividend’ demands
‘talent transformation’ on global standards and exposure to international higher education
systems and processes has positive benefits.
The educational system should highlight the importance of higher education and prepare the
students right from the primary education to get oriented towards attaining advanced skill
sets. With the collaborations of foreign partners this culture can be nurtured in a win-win
situation.
Universalization of good quality basic education can be achieved through public-private-
partnerships (PPP) which are needed to be expanded to tap into the potential offered by the
60% of secondary schools which are privately managed in India.
References
[1] Shetty, N.R. 2011, Impact on the quality of education due to the advent of foreign
universities, The Indian Journal of Technical Education: 16:20
[2] Hartmut Scharfe, “Education in Ancient India”, handbook of oriental studies, Sect 2:
India Vol. 16. Leiden Brill, 2002. PP 355
[3] www/indiaedu.com/history-education-India
[4] www.wikipedia.com/indian-education-system.html
[5] The manual handbook of Directorate of Education
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11. [6] Annual report 2005-06, Department of Education and Literacy & Department of
secondary and higher education, Ministry of HRD, Government of India
[7] P. Ravindran, “Education in India: Barely A Pass-mark”, the hindu business line, 28
Dec 2005
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