A Political Economy of Education in India: the Case of U.P
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A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EDUCATION IN INDIA: THE CASE OF U.P. by Geeta Gandhi Kingdon Mohd. Muzammil August 2000 Abstract The paper explores the political economy factors that influenced the evolution of educational institutions and shaped the legislation that now governs the education sector in UP. The study focuses on the extent of and reasons for teachers’ participation in politics, the evolution and activities of their unions, the size of their representation in the state legislature, and the link between these and other factors such as the enactment of particular education Acts in UP, teacher salaries and appointments, and the extent of centralisation in the management of schools. It attempts to draw out the implications for the functioning of schools. Keywords: education, political economy, teacher unions, elections, centralisation Institutional affiliation of authors: Dr. Geeta Kingdon: Research Officer, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UQ, United Kingdom. Tel: 00 44 1865 271065, email: [email protected] Dr. Mohd. Muzammil: Reader, Economics Department, Lucknow University, Lucknow 226 007, UP, India. Tel: 0522 419837. Acknowledgements: We would like to thank, without implicating in the final product, Jean Drèze for commenting on parts of the work reported in this paper. The research was partially funded by the India office of the UK government’s Department for International Development and partially by a Wellcome Trust grant number 053660. 1 A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EDUCATION IN INDIA: THE CASE OF U.P. by Geeta Gandhi Kingdon Mohd. Muzammil August 2000 1. Introduction There is now an impressive array of evidence linking education with both economic growth and social progress. This is an important reason to focus on education in India. More than half a century after independence, and despite the large-scale expansion of educational institutions over the past 50 years, the country’s educational achievements leave much to be desired. As seen in Table 1, the mean years of schooling in the population aged 25 years or more was a mere 2.4 years; the literacy rate among 15-19 year olds in 1991 was only 66% and among those who are 7 years old and above, 52%; and only 16% of females and 44% of males in the age 20 years and above had completed 8 years of schooling. The learning achievements of Indian children are very poor in inter-country comparisons according to the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)1. Table 1 Educational Achievements in India, 1991 Female Male Persons Literacy rate (%) age 7+ 39 64 52 age 15-19 55 75 66 Mean years of schooling (age 25+) 1.2 3.5 2.4 Median years of schooling (age 6+) 0.0 4.8 2.5 Proportion of adults (age 20+) with completed 8 16 44 30 years of education (%) Sources: Census of India, 1991; Table 3.9, National Family Health Survey 1992-93 (International Institute for Population Sciences, 1995, Mumbai); Human Development Report 1994 (United Nations Development Programme, New York), p147. 1 International comparison of achievement among school-going 14 year olds across 25 high and low-income countries, using IEA data collected in early 1970s, showed that the mean science test score of Indian students was the second lowest. Iran was behind India by a small margin. Mean scores of students in Bolivia, Thailand, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay were all higher than those of Indian students; the mean score of Japanese students was twice as high as that of Indian students. The results were similar in (own language) reading comprehension: median reading score was 26 points, Chile’s mean was 14 points, Iran’s 8 points and India’s the lowest at 5 points (Kingdon, 1994, p8). 2 There has been a great deal of analysis, recently, of the causes of India’s poor educational achievements. Varied reasons have put forward such as (i) lack of parental interest in the education of children either because uneducated parents do not value education (Times of India, 1997) or because the economic returns to education are too low (Pradhan and Subramaniam, 1999); (ii) poverty and the consequent need for child labour (Campaign Against Child Labour, 1998); (iii) poor quality of supply, in terms of impoverished school infrastructure and lack of teachers2; (iv) the high private cost of education (Tilak, 1996). In contrast to these single-focus explanations, the PROBE Report (the Probe Team, 1999) presents what seems to be the first comprehensive and integrated analysis of the causes of poor educational attainments of Indian children. Based on PROBE data, Drèze and Kingdon’s quantitative analysis (2000) supports a ‘pluralist’ view of the causes of educational deprivation in rural India which gives due recognition to several key demand- and supply-side determinants of school participation: household resources, parental motivation, the returns to child labour, and school quality. The Probe Team (1999) also acknowledged the importance of other factors such as the burden of a dull and over-stretching curriculum and the centrality of more ‘macro’ factors such as teacher accountability, the extent of centralisation in the management of schools, and the effect of teacher politics on the functioning of schools in India. According to Drèze and Gazdar (1997, p76-77), “the most striking weakness of the schooling system in rural Uttar Pradesh (UP) is not so much the deficiency of physical infrastructure as the poor functioning of the existing facilities. The specific problem of endemic teacher absenteeism and shirking, which emerged again and again in the course of our investigation, plays a central part in that failure3. This is by far the most important issue of education policy in Uttar Pradesh today”. The PROBE Report (1999, p63) recognises this and links teacher absenteeism and shirking partly to the disempowering environment in which the teachers have to work in India: being “trapped in a ramshackle village school, surrounded by disgruntled parents, irregular pupils and over-bearing inspectors, [teachers] can hardly be expected to work with enthusiasm”. However, it also says “yet, the deterioration of teaching standards has gone much too far to be explained by the disempowerment factor alone”. It goes on to link teacher absenteeism and shirking to the lack of monitoring and local accountability of teachers4. This, 2 The appalling state of rural primary schools has been well documented by many authors. To cite a recent example, the Probe Team (1999) discovered that in a sample survey of villages in rural north India, only 41% of all primary schools had drinking water; only 40% had non-leaking roofs; only 25% had at least two teachers, two all-weather class rooms and some teaching aids; 33% of primary schools had a single teacher present on the day of the survey; the pupil-teacher ratio was 50, and the proportion of teachers doing multi -grade teaching was 73%. 3 Our observations in rural UP that a good proportion of teachers own some side business apart from their school teaching work, such as bookshops, general stores and even small industries in towns and in the countryside. Sometimes they also work as contractors for the abundant public works, particularly in rural areas. The Probe Report has also mentioned, “... during the selection of investigators for the PROBE survey, no less than three goverment primary school teachers offered their services, in the middle of the school year, for three months at a stretch” (Probe Team, 1999, page 63). This shows that teachers welcome work (other than teaching) concurrently with their school job, suggesting negligence towards their teaching job. Many authors who have done field surveys of schools in India have documented the chronic problem of teacher absenteeism. 4 The PROBE Report observed that during a school survey in 242 villages across 5 north Indian states, in a large number of cases “there was no teaching activity at the time of the investigators’ visit. It is significant that this pattern occured even in cases where the school infrastructure (in terms of number of class rooms, teaching aids and even teacher-pupil ratio) was relatively good. Inactive teachers were found engaged in a variety of 3 in turn, has its roots in teachers’ own demands for a centralised education system, as discussed later in this volume. Educational development in UP has been deeply affected by political considerations. Gould (1972) observed that “political penetration of the education system has gone far in Uttar Pradesh. In this respect the province is probably not unique in India, but it stands out when compared with many others” (p94). Another reason for suggesting that political penetration in education is greater in UP than in most other states is that UP is among only 4 states in India that still has a Legislative Council – the upper chamber of the state parliament – at which body teachers have guaranteed representation. Gould suggests that the high degree of political penetration helps account for certain patterns of educational development in the state which are otherwise difficult to understand. Political influence has been of two types: one, political influence from above which has been instrumental in shaping the education system; and two, the political lobbying and pressure groups from within the system originating at the local levels (and uniting at the State level) in the form of organisations of teachers. Education related legislation in UP has often been framed under immense lobbying pressure from teachers, particularly at the primary and secondary levels of education. Teachers in school (as opposed to higher) education have been instrumental in determining the local base of political parties in the State. The influence of teachers’ organisations in the primary and secondary education sectors was particularly pronounced during the 1960s and early 1970s and again in the early and late 1980s.