Marginalisation and Education
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Marginalisation and Education Schooling for Children on the Bihar Jharkhand Border Between Katihar and Sahibganj Districts Meera Samson and Neha Gupta (with Sunil Saroj and Sanjeev Pillai) Collaborative Research and Dissemination (CORD) March 2011 -- March 2012 1 Acknowledgements We are delighted to have been able to undertake the study on ‘Marginalisation and Education: Schooling for Children on the Bihar Jharkhand Border between Katihar and Sahibganj Districts’. We completed a similar study on schooling on the Andhra Pradesh – Orissa border between Visakhapatnam and Koraput districts in 2010. For this we thank NEG-FIRE, and Marita Eshwaran in particular, for providing us with the opportunity. This study was carried out with the support of NEG-FIRE’s partners – Purnea Social Service Society in Purnea district and Abhiyan in Sahibganj district, headed by Fr. Francis Tirkey and Mr. Subaan Khan, respectively. We thank both of them, and others in their team, for sharing their insights, facilitating meetings with district and block education authorities, and accompanying CORD persons during their initial visit to villages in the district. We also thank them for providing four persons who could be part of the field team – Kanhu Hansda, Hanju Marandi, and Ganesh Murmu from Katihar and Bishnu Kumar Bhagat from Sahibganj. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of our other field investigators -- Jitendra Sahoo, Manoj Samantaray, Manas Ranjan Mishra, and Rashmi Kant Sahoo (from Orissa), and Pramila Srivastava, Sapna Bhatnagar and Suresh Kumar Goswami (from Rajasthan). We also thank Mr. Naveen Jha from Bal Mahila Kalyan in Katihar, for giving us his valuable time to share his experiences of working in villages in Katihar district. The research was led by Meera Samson and Anuradha De, working closely with the larger CORD team of Neeru Sood, Rajeev Kumar, Neha Gupta, Sunil Saroj, and Sanjeev Pillai. Neha Gupta, Sunil Saroj, and Sanjeev Pillai also participated in the fieldwork. Sanjeev Kumar provided logistical support from Delhi. The CORD team would like to thank Pratham for allowing us to use their learning achievement tests. They also thank Vimala Ramachandran for sharing her research tools with them. These fed into the tools for classroom and school observation that CORD developed for this research. The team expresses its gratitude to the local authorities, teachers, parents and children who cooperated with them during the survey and also shared their opinions and experiences, thus making this study possible. Finally, the authors of the study of schooling on the Bihar Jharkhand border wish to acknowledge the contribution of the CORD-NEG study of schooling on the Andhra-Orissa border which provided a framework when analysing the data and writing up this study. Meera Samson and Neha Gupta March 2012 2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Background The objective of the study was to study the schooling experience of children in inter-state border areas. 1 The two districts of Katihar and Sahibganj were carefully chosen for study because they share such a border. The study hypothesised that the access and quality of children’s schooling experience would be negatively impacted by their being based in border districts, far from the centres of power in the State capitals. Both Katihar and Jharkhand are relatively far from their respective State capitals (Katihar is 305 km from Patna and Sahibganj is 416 km from Ranchi). Literacy in the two districts is very low (54% both in Katihar and in Sahibganj, Census 2011). The focus was to be particularly on the experience of children from marginalised communities, who would be most vulnerable to dropping out of school on account of both sociocultural and economic factors. Both districts have a high proportion of disadvantaged communities. Katihar has a high proportion of Muslims (43%), and small proportions of SCs (9%) and STs (6%). Sahibganj also has a high proportion of Muslims (31%), though less than in Katihar. It also has a large tribal population (29%) and a small dalit population (6%). Schooling is at a very nascent stage in these communities. Literacy rates are even lower than for the general population, as a whole. In 2001, while literacy rates for Katihar and Sahibganj were 35% and 38% respectively, literacy rates for Muslims were 25% and 30%, respectively, and literacy rates for Scheduled Tribes were 24% in both districts. Secondary data indicates that both in Sahibganj and Katihar, access even to primary schooling is far from universal. The proportion of villages with primary schools in Sahibganj and Katihar was as low as 46% and 61%, respectively in 2001. The availability of upper primary schools was worse. Access to both primary and upper primary schools has improved greatly in the previous decade, but it is likely that there is still a shortfall. One should note that the schools are not accessible year-round. Much of Katihar district is flooded during the monsoon every year, and schools have to be closed for several months at a time. In addition, a large proportion of villages in both districts are not accessible through pakka roads, and the location of schools across fields, and in fields, makes it extremely difficult to access these schools when it rains. There are implications for maintaining the schools that have been set up in these districts – ensuring that good infrastructure and facilities are available and functional is difficult in remote and less- developed areas, as also in areas that are regularly flooded. We had also hypothesized that recruiting qualified and trained teachers to be appointed to schools in villages in the more remote blocks in Katihar and Sahibganj would be difficult. However, with a change in teacher recruitment policy, in both Bihar and Jharkhand, teacher education qualifications are not essential for entry into teaching, and teachers are recruited at village level at low salaries. Teachers are still in short supply, although a large number of posts have been filled. 1 NEG FIRE has been interested in issues of marginalization and education in inter-state border areas. What has struck them particularly in their work over the years are the language issues faced by children living in these areas. 3 Secondary data is useful to give a macro picture of the districts as a whole. We get a picture of Katihar as a large densely-populated district with 16 blocks, with relatively high enrolment at primary level (GER of 153 in 2008-09), but a transition rate of only 49% between primary and upper primary levels. Sahibganj is much smaller, also densely populated though less than Katihar, with 9 blocks. It also has very high enrolment at primary level (GER of 181 in 2008-09), with a slightly higher transition rate between primary and upper primary of 66%. In both districts, schools had very high SCRs, indicating a huge shortfall in classrooms. PTRs were also high, reflecting that more teachers need to be appointed. This study goes below district level, and provides credible ground-level data on the quality of schooling in a number of contiguous blocks on both sides of the border between Katihar and Sahibganj. The challenges in the educational system suggested by secondary data were extremely visible in our study. Methodology Main Components of the Study School Survey: A detailed survey of all education facilities with primary grades was conducted in April-May 2011 in 30-32 villages selected randomly from 3 contiguous blocks in Katihar district, Bihar and 3 contiguous blocks in Sahibganj district, Jharkhand. Villages without any schools with primary grades were replaced. This phase used primarily quantitative survey methods. It constituted Phase I of the study. The school survey in Phase 1 of the study is useful for giving us a macro-picture of schooling in these blocks. We supplement these findings with insights from the village studies Village Studies: The school survey was followed by a study of schooling in three villages in Manihari block (Katihar) and 3 villages in Sahibganj block (Sahibganj) (one week in each village). We selected villages with variations in levels of accessibility and literacy rates to get a range of schooling experiences for children. The idea was to supplement the overview of schooling obtained through the quantitative survey in Phase I with some in-depth understanding of factors which affect access and quality of schooling in these border areas. The village studies took place in May-June 2011, and constituted Phase II of the research. A range of research tools were used to get information on the village as a whole and to get information on schooling in that village. In addition to teacher interviews and school and classroom observation, households of 20 children were randomly selected from the school register. These were visited for parent and child interviews, and to test all children in the 6-14 age group to get some indication of their levels of learning. Ten of the 20 randomly-selected children were tracked over 4 days – whether present in school, if not why -- to gain insights into nominal enrolment; regularity of attendance; strength of the attendance register; and causes for absence. Focus group discussions were also held with adolescent boys and girls to get their feedback about schooling in the village and work pressures on them. 4 Findings 2 The border between Katihar and Sahibganj has become an inter-State border only since the formation of Jharkhand in 2000. There is a lot of movement between the two districts. Families travel regularly across the Ganga (on a somewhat unpredictable ferry service), from one district to the other, in search of work, to graze animals or meet relatives. It may be of value to note that the kind of problems that may be found in other inter-state border areas are not necessarily shared by the Katihar-Sahibganj border, 3 and those that are shared can be because of reasons other than due to being border districts.