Journal of Educational Planning and Administration Volume XIX Number 4 October 2005 NIEPA © National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration 17-B, Sri Aurobindo Marg New Delhi 110016 ISSN 0971-3859 © NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATIONAL PLANNING AND ADMINISTRATION, 2005 Annual Subscription Within India Outside India (By Airmail) Individuals Rs. 150 U S $ 6 0 Institutions Rs. 350 US $ 85 Annual Subscription commences with January and ends with October every year. Advertisement Tariff (For one issue) Full Page Rs. 2000 U S $100 H a lf Page Rs. 1100 U S $55 Bank draft may be sent to the Deputy Publication Officer, NIEPA in the name of the National Institute o f Educational Planning and Administration payable at New Delhi. NIEPA Limited© copies of some back issues are also available. Published by the Registrar, National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, 17-B, Sri Aurobindo Marg, New Delhi - 110016 and printed by the Publication Unit, NIEPA at M/s. Prabhat Offset Press, 2622, Kucha Chellan, Darya Ganj, New Delhi - 110002. JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL PLANNING AND ADMINISTRATION Vol. X IX No. 4 (October 2005) CONTENTS P age No. ARTICLES Education, Caste, Gender: Dalit Girls' al Access to Schooling in Maharashtra 459 Padma Velaskar Economic Benefits of Adult Literacy Interventions 483 John Cameron and Stuart Cameron Public Education Expenditure in Karnataka: Alternative Databases and 511 Empirical Implications M.R. Narayana Educational Attainment in India: Trends, Patterns and Policy Issues 523 Dipa Mukherjee RESEARCH NOTE Vocational Training for Women in Informal Employment 543 • RatnaM. Sudarshan NIEPA 551 BOOK REVIEW S (See overleaf) BOOKS RECEIVED 581 585 CONTENTS OF VOLUME© XIX (2005) Corrigendum The paper entitled Literacy and Participatory Human Development: An Illustrative Indian Exercise published in the JOURNAL, Vol. X IX , No. 3 (July 2005) was actually authored by Rabindranath Mukhopadhyay and Sudeshna Ghosh, Department of Economics, Scottish Church College, Calcutta. The name of the second author was inadvertently omitted while processing the paper for print. The error is regretted. Editor BOOK REVIEWS Education Policy Globalization, Citizenship and Democracy 551 (M ark Olssen, et. al.) Kuldeep Mathur Gifted and Talented Education (Mohan Nath Dubey) 553 PC. Bansal Educational Foundations - An Anthology of Critical Readings 556 (Alan S. Canestrari & Bruce A. Marlowe eds.) R.P. Singh Lifelong Learning Discourses in Europe (Carolyn Medel-Anoneuvo ed.) 560 B.K. Panda Changing Class: Education and Social Change in Post-Apartheid South Africa 564 (Linda Chisholm) Jacob Aikara Sources of Economic Growth in India 1950-51 to 1999-2000 567 (S. Sivasubramonian) Jandhyala Vishwanath Policy Options for Student Loan Schemes: Lessons from Five A sian Case 570 Studies (Adrian Ziderman) J.L. Azad NIEPA The North-East Elementary Education (Jayashree Roy) 573 Avinash Kumar Singh Management Skills in Schools: A Resource for School Leaders (Jeff Jones) 575 Indu Khetrapal How Educational© Ideologies are Shaping Global Society: Inter-governmental 577 Organizations, NGOs, and the Decline of the Nation-State (Joel Spring) Jandhyala B. G. Tilak Journal of Educational Planning and Administration Volume XIX, No. 4, October 2005, pp. 459-482 Education, Caste, Gender Dalit G irls’ Access to Schooling in Maharashtra Padma V elaskar* * The problem of women's educational access and opportunity are receiving renewed and urgent attention today in the context of the national developmental failure to universalise elementary education even at the turn of the twentieth century. At a more fundamental level, the persistence of gender disparities in schooling has cast a long shadow on the feminist project of using education as an instrument of overcoming women's oppression. Simultaneously, however, a proper understanding of changing situations of educational access is hampered by monolithic theoretical approaches that fail to take adequate account of intersections between multiple forms of social inequality and of the significance of socio-historical contexts and dynamic \of development. In India, for example, educational issues as related to caste, class, gender, ethnicity and region, and are by and large separately examined. Educational analysis does not take into account the interactive influences of these structural variables and tends therefore to homogenise, simplify or distort a complex and highly differentiated educational reality. Justice is not done to variations and differences between and within larger social categories. This paper is concerned with examining the implications of the interaction between caste, class and patriarchy for educational access of women belonging to dalit communities, who were subsumed hitherto under two homogenising categories of 'woman' and 'dalit'. Identified as a key strategy of liberation, education has been increasingly availed by both women and dalits. Yet the question remains as to whether the problem of universalisation continues to basically derive out of the historical legacy of their educational and social exclusion.NIEPA Do women and dalits continue to remain excluded, and for that matter to what extent and for what reasons? Moreover, due to the tendency to homogenise, when we speak of dalit advance we don't know the gender picture and when we talk of women's advance we don't usually have a caste differential analysis. Following an interactive approach, we explore the specific educational situation of dalit women who have historically occupied a distinctive subordination as a result of their location in untouchable castes and their multiple oppression under traditional caste-patriarchy.© The paper examines the extent to which dalit (viz. ex-untouchable) women have been able to cut across barriers of caste, class and gender to gain access to schooling. To what * Revised version of paper presented at 'Seminar on Women's Education and Development' held at Malsisar, Rajasthan, (July 31 - August 2, 2004). ** Dr. Padma Velaskar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Post Box No. 8313, Sion Trombay Raod, Deonar, Mumbai-400088. Email: [email protected] 460 Education, Caste, Gender: Dalit Girls' Educational Access extent and to what educational level have they achieved parity with dalit boys and "general category", assumedly, non-dalit girls? We focus on dalit girls' access to schooling in Maharashtra, the state where both women and dalits have achieved greater levels of educational parity and educational linked social mobility as compared to their counterparts in some other large states. A comparative historical methodological approach permits exploration of the changing relationship between caste, gender and educational expansion, the focus of which is dalit girl's educational participation at primary and secondary levels of schooling. Issues of women's educational access we believe must also be underlined by a concern with women's freedom from oppression and improvements for them in social opportunities and life chances through education. It is, however, not within the scope of this paper to explore the social impact of education on dalit women's lives. The paper begins with a brief history of dalit women's education in the colonial context, and of modern educational development among Maharashtra's dalits and women, only in broad strokes, since much historical educational research needs to be done to unravel processes and forces of educational advance among these sections. The second section of the paper is an attempt to understand the main trends in dalit women's educational trajectory and chronicle patterns of caste/gender inequality in the post-colonial period. It conducts a comparative analysis of the educational progress of dalit girls with that of dalit boys and non-dalit girls, ascertaining patterns of enrolment, dropout and attendance at school. It also attempts to examine temporal change in levels of disparity. Given the historical legacy of regional imbalance in the state, we further examine inter-district variations in dalit girls' access to schooling. Intra-caste (i.e. within the dalit category) disparities are also an historical legacy. However, we are unable to anlayse these due to absence of caste-wise educational data. The data base for the second part of the paper is census data and enrolment statistics published by the Government of Maharashtra. We must, however, state at the outset that, determining these patterns is a difficult task due to limitations of available educational data. Separate time-series data on dalit enrolment are not available upNIEPA to late seventies in the publications of the Directorate of Education, Government of Maharashtra. A major shortcoming is that the vital rural/urban breakdown of enrolment/institutional data is unavailable. As is well-known to educational researchers, enrolment ratios are imperfect indicators of progress since they do not exclude under-age and over-age children. Ideally they should measure the number of pupils enrolled at a particular level of education who fall within the prescribed age limit for that stage© as a percent ofthe total number ofthe eligible within that age group in the concerned population. In the absence of both age and class specific enrolment, our estimates of enrolment ratios tend to be inflated. Further, we do not have reliable estimates ofthe non-enrolled. In view of all these inadequacies and limitations we can at best, in this paper, indicate broad trends and make broad generalisations. Nevertheless,