Abhishek's Sharings

Primary Education in India – Challenges and Solutions

Posted on February 7, 2010. Filed under: Activity Based Learning, Primary Education, Social Venture | Tags: Activity Based Learning, Inclusion, Mobile Schools, Primary Education, Social Enterprises |

Last month, during 29-31 Jan 2010, SIGMA & EDC at  XLRI Jamshedpur , under guidance of Prof Madhukar Shukla, organized a workshop oriented National Conference on Social Enterprises with “Solutions for Inclusive Development” as its theme. The conference was based upon Harrison Owen’s Open Space Technology allowing each participant to identify and choose a theme of interest and work collaboratively with others to discover new solutions. View the video here –

One of the themes was “Universal Primary Education” under the larger objective of inclusive growth.  The group had very experienced resources persons, each a significant contributor so far –

1. Ashok Kamath – Chairman, Akshara Foundation
2. Pravin Mahajan – Executive Director, Janarth NGO
3. Ashish Rajpal – MD, idiscoveri and
4. Dr Rukmini Banerji – Director, Pratham

The group had its first meeting on 30^th from 11 AM till evening and delivered a presentation on the next day to entire audience. This post is a summary of the key issues raised and the solutions perceived and proposed during the discussion on primary education and beyond.

The statistics of primary education in India reflect the gaps as under –

(In Million)	Enrolled	Eligible	Gap	Enrolled %
Grade 1-5	131	156	25	84
Grade 6-8	52	91	39	57
Grade 9-12	36	114	78	32
Total	219	361	142	61

Ashok Kamath moderated the first round of discussion and identified 3 subcategories for further discussion –

1. Strengthening the government system
2. Quality issues (Technology / Innovation / Pedagogy)
3. Inclusive strategies and delivery system

Pravin Mahajan addressed INCLUSION and spoke about the work his organization Janarth is doing to provide education to the excluded children of migratory labor workers in western and southern India. He said, “Cost of education is less than cost of ignorance”. Exclusion can be categorized under 2 major types –

- By societal design

• Physically or mentally challenged children
• Children with learning disabilities
• Girls due to various reasons such as early marriage, poor sanitation, lack of transportation, household work, labour work, lack of schools nearby etc

- By force

• Labour migration
• Poverty

It was also found that inclusion has not been uniform across the country and there are different levels of maturity even within inclusion category. The group came up with following suggestions as solutions –

1. Counselling with parents (different in each context) such as to celebrate small achievements of disabled children or not to neglect education of children as far as possible
2. Increase in schools for special children and also in teachers for special kids
3. Bring school close to children (Janarth Model)

Janarth has established a simple model to reach the excluded children. They have mobile schools on motorcycles with a kit containing 3 Ls – Library, Laboratory and Laptop.

Ashish Rajpal took up the QUALITY issues as difficult words, too much theory, lack of involvement, high drop-out, resistance to change the methodology, mindset of teachers etc. He further summed up these issues in two core problems –

1. Poor design of curriculum and
2. Poor or ineffective delivery and teaching methods

He quoted his own work being delivered through iDiscoveri and gave an example how teaching can be made interesting for kids as well as teachers. He brought the teaching problem to one issue – can the assigned lecture be delivered by the teacher? If yes, it doesn’t matter what the qualification of the teacher is.

iDiscoveri has designed xSeed as the complete solution to make teaching creative and interesting. As per Ashish, through xSeed, they not only train the teachers but also ensure that the teaching is delivered in the way it is expected with tools necessary. So far they have chosen 4 subjects – Maths, English, Social Science and Science for KG-08 standards. Within last 4 years, they have covered 250 schools in India and recently Govt of Bhutan has also adopted xSeed methodology in its primary schools.

Dr Rukmini touched upon the GOVT SYSTEM related issues and informed the team members about huge funds available through Sarv Sikhsha Abhiyan under GoI schemes. She also brought out the fact that in terms of performance, govt schools are not really lagging much behind the pvt schools. She narrated the work being done by her organization in Maharashtra through Bal-Wadis and how the demand continuously pulled her to expand the work slowly but steadily.

Ashok Kamath also talked about initiatives taken up by Akshara Foundation to strengthen the systems. Akshara has been very innovative. It has collected statistical information about certain schools in Bangalore  and mapped that to the online google-maps thus making the final information available online to all users.

One of the solutions expressed was to have low cost chain of primary schools from private sector as it was felt that govt has its own limitations in providing professionally run educational services. Another solution was to utilize the funds available through PPP based programs driven by either NGOs or social enterprises.

The discussion was attended by following participants – Diwakar Kaushik, Zala, Ritesh, Rakesh, Pritika, Soumi, Romil Sood, B Ganesh, Sangita, Akanksha, Nitesh, Shubhashish, Sakshi, Mr B Rajendiran, Pulkesh, Vijay Gautam, Gaurav, Rakesh, Arvind, Kornica, Kumari, Aditi and Abhishek.

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