In the spirit of Diwali and new beginnings, I started this column determined to find good news stories in our school education system, because that is the foundation of a New India. I set out to explore, hoping that we are steadily building on a strong foundation for hundreds of millions of our children to grow into truly educated, aware, skilled and productive citizens of the most populous nation on earth. The discovery is tragic and frustrating. 

But first some good news: Sandip Karbhari Gund (whom I hadn’t heard of until this week, and I am a little ashamed about it) is a 30-year-old who taught third-and fourth-grade children in a small zilla parishad school in Pashtepada, a tiny farming hamlet (population 347) in Shahapur taluka in Maharashtra’s Thane district. Sandip’s innovation has put Pashtepada on the national map, but note three things: it got a proper road only after Sandip rose to prominence; it still has very patchy electricity (most houses have none and there are long blackouts during the monsoons); and despite Sandip becoming a symbol of Digital India, it still does not have broadband connectivity-in other words no Internet. 

These obstacles did not deter Sandip from creating, about seven years ago, a digital classroom based on Activity Based Digital Learning. He jury-rigged a solar-powered battery pack connected to an LED screen. He charged his ‘master tablet’ when the light came on for a few hours every evening. He set up his own WiFi router, and gave each child a tablet on which they could download Android apps, lessons from the teacher’s tablet, and access an offline library on a one-terabyte hard disk that Gund populated with his research. Every weekend and holiday he travelled 40 km by bus to a cyber-café in Shahapur, the nearest town, where he spent hours surfing the web and gathering lesson material. Last year Sandip’s class had 27 children; 13 of them were girls. 

This is history. Last month Sandip was one of six teachers who won national awards for their initiatives in ICT (information and communication technology) based teaching. Now Sandip is on a two-year deputation with the Maharashtra government. From his Pune base, he has travelled the length and breadth of the state, evangelising the virtues of the digital classroom. 

Prodded by Maharashtra’s education secretary Nand Kumar, about 60,000 government schools in the state are now on board the digital bandwagon. Last April, the state launched MITRA (Maharashtra In-service Teachers’ Resource App). Any teacher with a smartphone can download the app and use it to project lessons and video on a smart TV screen. Nand Kumar told me he plans to expand MITRA to all of the state’s 22.5 million schoolchildren over the next two years (he also has to plan for two million children joining school every year). 

Last month the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) launched DIKSHA, a portal that aggregates replicable and scalable digital infrastructures “keeping teachers at the centre”. Andhra Pradesh has just linked its e-knowledge exchange (APEKX) to DIKSHA. Both are running with technical support from Ek Step, a non-profit set up by Nandan and Rohini Nilekani and Shankar Maruwada that aims to gather partners on a collaborative platform and reach 200 million children by 2020. In turn, EkStep has incubated Sunbird, an open-source, modular platform for creating solutions for teachers and students. 

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 mandated compulsory free education for all children in India between the ages of six and 14 (in other words, elementary school between grades 1 and 8). School enrolment has shot up to 100% over the past decade. But are we really educating our children? 

Let me insert a few statistics. The budget of the central government for school education has languished. After raising it slightly from the UPA level in his first year in power, Narendra Modi has kept the schools budget consistently low. The figures speak for themselves: ₹52,701 crore in 2013-14, ₹55,115 crore in 2014-15, ₹42,219 crore in 2015-16, ₹43,554 crore in 2016-17, and ₹46,356 crore in 2017-18. The 2016-17 budget translates to 0.36% of India’s gross domestic product. Even if you add state governments’ education budgets, which some estimates say takes national spending to 2.6% of GDP, this is a low outlay on school education (China will spend 4% this year). 

Some more data: we have 1.07 million government elementary schools, about 101,000 government secondary schools, and 4.68 million government school teachers. Krishna Kumar, a former director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training, told me the government estimated four years ago that we were short of another 1.3 million elementary-school teachers to meet the RTE-mandated ratio of one teacher for every 30 students. 

Nobody has calculated, Prof Kumar says, what the shortfall is in secondary schools, which are over-crowded because the RTE does not cover secondary schools. It only commands that no student must be detained in elementary school. The Modi government has tabled an amendment to the RTE to permit detention in classes 5 and 8 after ex-aminations and re-examinations. The No Detention Policy has been blamed for a 17% dropout rate in classes 9 and 10, as the competition becomes real. As Kumar notes, surveys indicate overcrowded classrooms, a shortage of secondary-school teachers (especially in the sciences), and a shortage of laboratories and libraries. The crisis in tertiary education is also acute — but that is another story. 

Anil Swarup, secretary for School Education and Literacy, said after he took up his post last November he travelled to nearly every state in the country, picking up best-practice stories of how things were going right in our schools. “I discovered some wonderful models that are already operational. We picked a hundred models and organised a workshop to discuss them. Then we picked 25 models that were replicable and scalable. We road-showed them in regional workshops,” Swarup told me. 

The Ministry of Human Resource Development also met about 200 private-sector corporate social responsibility (CSR) funding agencies. The Maharashtra government alone has raised over ₹300 crore from the private sector for school education using crowd-funding. Next month, the MHRD will launch a portal on which both non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and CSR agencies can register, and look for collaborations with state governments, and monitor the progress of projects they sponsor or implement. 

Do our children really learn anything in this vast schooling labyrinth? Year after year, the independent Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has chronicled a dismal state of affairs, with Class 5 students unable to read Class 2 textbooks. The 2016 ASER surveyed 562,305 children in 17,473 villages across 589 districts. Worried about the quality of learning, the government has asked the states to draft learning outcomes that can be evaluated. On November 13, the MHRD is set to launch a National Assessment Survey. The results of its assessment of 3 million children will be published in December. “It will give us an idea of what is going wrong where, and help us take corrective measures,” Swarup says. 

Are we on our way to fixing our schools? Far from it. As Swarup, Kumar and NCTE chairman Santhosh Mathew agree, the real problem is not the calibre of our children. It is the competence of our teachers. In my next column, I will look at the shocking state of teaching in our government schools. That is the house of horrors we must defenestrate. 

Share this story