Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations (28 page)

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

—Plutarch

IN FEBRUARY 2015, the state of Maharashtra held its annual evaluation tests for nearly 400,000 teachers of government-run schools, who taught either primary school (classes 1–5) or upper primary school (classes 6–8). Of all the primary school teachers taking the test, only 1 per cent passed. Their colleagues in the upper primary section fared better—nearly 5 per cent of them passed the exam. To put it bluntly, 99 per cent of Maharashtra’s primary school teachers and 95 per cent of its upper primary school teachers are unfit to teach, and this is in a state that has better education statistics than most—99 per cent of children between the ages of six and fourteen in Maharashtra are officially enrolled in school, and there is one teacher for every twenty-five students.
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These alarming test results belie the fact that teachers in India receive up to 80 per cent of all public expenditure on education.
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‘Few things are as wide-ranging in their impact on the economy as education. The collapse of our schools is a deep crack in India’s foundation, and it impacts everything from our health achievements and fertility rates to our economic mobility and political choices.’ This
statement from
Imagining India
emphasizes the vital role of education in our nation’s progress. Nearly 25 per cent of our population is still illiterate;
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how can we hope to reap the benefits of the technological revolution if one in four people cannot read or write? Our counterparts in the group of BRICS nations all have better literacy rates—nearly 90 per cent—and better student-to-teacher ratios than we do.

The problems bedevilling India’s education sector are not new, reflecting the impact of a complex set of social and political ideologies whose historical evolution Nandan has already traced in
Imagining India
. Since then the government has continued to launch new schemes designed at promoting universal education. First came the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, followed by the Right to Education Act (2009), both laudable pieces of legislation in their vision and scope for educating India’s children.

Sadly, as is true of so many well-intentioned schemes in India, implementation has been the big stumbling block. Focused on easily measurable outcomes—schools built, teachers appointed, attendance rates of pupils—the quality of the education being provided has taken a back seat. As Rukmini Banerjee, the director of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) centre, says, ‘By just providing inputs we are not bringing in equity. Unless the entire expenditure and the effort behind the provision of schooling is translated effectively into learning outcomes, the real battle for equal opportunity will be lost and our large and growing public expenditure in education wasted.’
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While enrolment rates remain high, many students drop out within a few years of entering school; UNICEF estimates that out of the nearly 200 million children enrolled in school in India, 80 million are likely to drop out without completing elementary school.
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Even while they’re in school, they’re not learning much; according to the latest ASER published under the aegis of Pratham, an NGO that has led pioneering efforts in education reform, 78 per cent of children in standard three and 53 per cent of children in standard five cannot
read a standard two-level text.
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The study has also uncovered an escalating preference among parents to enrol their children in private schools, even in rural areas, believing that private schools offer a higher standard of instruction and are a better investment towards securing their children’s future. These are the outcomes after India has spent $94 billion on primary education over the last decade.

The growing split between public and private schools is symptomatic of the larger malaise affecting the field of education. As Madhav Chavan, Pratham co-founder, states, ‘The dominant thinking in the education establishment for the last decade has been that if we do more of what we have been doing and do it better, the quality of education will improve.’
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Clearly, this mode of thinking has to be jettisoned, and fast, if we are to catch up with our goals of educating our children. Karthik Muralidharan, an economist and professor at the University of California, San Diego, writes, ‘It is therefore imperative that education policy shift its emphasis from simply providing more school inputs in a “business as usual” way and focus on improving education outcomes.’
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If we are to effect rapid and scalable change, we need to use the kinds of technological tools that are starting to revolutionize the way people disseminate and accumulate knowledge around the world.

Online education systems are disrupting the traditional learning experience at both the school and college level. At the school level, teacher and entrepreneur Salman Khan’s Khan Academy, a free online education platform, is changing the way students work in a classroom. Khan Academy provides online videos on a variety of subjects, along with problem sets whose difficulty level changes depending upon the capabilities of the user. By viewing these videos at home and then working on homework during school hours with the assistance of a teacher, Khan’s videos are flipping the traditional classroom set-up.
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In Khan’s words, ‘Students can hear lectures at home and spend their time at school doing “homework”—that is, working on problems.
It allows them to advance at their own pace, gaining real mastery, and it lets teachers spend more time giving one-to-one instruction.’ Khan is now working with schools to integrate his videos into the standard curriculum. His team also created a dashboard that would allow teachers to monitor students’ progress at an individual level, an idea that sounds simple but has tremendous potential. ‘We’d go collect some data and make a chart, and the teachers were blown away—every time,’ he says. ‘This isn’t taxing the edge of technology. But they were completely shocked, as if this had never existed before.’ By creating a model in which students can learn at their own pace and are rewarded for mastery of a certain topic while also allowing teachers to monitor progress and provide targeted help to each student, Khan Academy has pioneered a practical approach to the concept of one-on-one education.

Technology can also be used to address what Karthik Muralidharan has termed ‘the biggest crisis in the Indian education system’—the challenge of providing high-quality primary education.
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In addition to the statistics we quote above, ASER surveys show that only a quarter of all students in standard five can perform simple mathematical division, and less than half can read. The magnitude of the crisis in primary education calls for out-of-the-box solutions that can help to fill in the gaps that the current system cannot address. To this end, Nandan and his wife Rohini have funded a not-for-profit initiative called EkStep, whose goal is ‘to create a learner-centric technology-based platform to improve applied literacy and numeracy for 200 million-plus children in five years’.

Children learn better when their lessons are engaging, interactive and fun; to this end, EkStep plans to gamify the basic concepts of literacy and numeracy, turning them into engaging content that can be offered on smart devices like tablets or smartphones. ‘Self-learning through gamification’ is the mantra here—children can assimilate knowledge at their own pace, in a format which is simple and entertaining. This kind of learning can take place both in schools and outside them, allowing students to consume ‘bytes’ of individualized learning, much like the Khan Academy model.

The child-friendly EkStep user interface will be supported by collaborative content and a scalable technology platform, which can be distributed through multiple channels. Ravi Gururaj, the chairman of NASSCOM’s product council, has said that a project like this ‘leapfrogs the status quo, leverages technology to the hilt, delivers massive platform value and transforms early education across the nation for all classes of citizens’.
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The fundamental idea behind EkStep has also received validation from Bill Gates, who thinks that, ‘Rapid advances in education software on mobile phones will change the way students and teachers around the world learn every day.’
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When it comes to higher education, the traditional university experience and method of education are being challenged by MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Starting when prestigious universities like Harvard, Stanford and MIT decided to make videotaped lectures available on the internet, today companies like Coursera, Udacity and edX offer entire courses online from some of the world’s best universities, allowing people to sign up, view lectures and submit homework from anywhere in the world, creating a global education network. MOOCs have become hugely popular in India so much so that Indians make up the largest foreign student user base at Coursera, and are among the top users at Udacity and edX as well.
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Students now have free access to world-class instruction from brand-name schools; they can also opt to pay for certain services, such as online exams or certificates of completion, which are used to bolster their resumes.

Some of India’s top universities, such as the IITs, are part of these MOOC platforms, but we do have our own indigenous online education systems as well. The Government of India runs the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) which has launched an online education portal called Sakshat. In addition, the NMEICT is also in charge of the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), in which seven IITs and the Indian Institute of Science are collaborating to create online content for science and engineering students.
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The challenge now lies in integrating these online platforms into the regular curriculum. MOOCs are currently
viewed as an addendum to traditional classroom-based coursework; the latter enables you to get a degree from a deemed university, while the former is more important for acquiring the kind of skills that will help you land a job, a crucial aspect in a country whose standards of higher education are so low that nearly half the graduates it churns out every year are unemployable in any sector.
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While MOOCs bring up regulatory concerns around innovation and the role of the state in education, there is another disruption that the government can bring about through incentive design. The concept of school vouchers has been discussed at length over the years, and was mentioned in
Imagining India
as well. This idea grants the power of choice to the consumer, and funds students instead of schools. Rather than pouring money only into government schools, a fraction of the funds can be used to grant school vouchers, which students can then use to pay for their education at a school of their choice. Naturally, students will gravitate to the institution that provides the best level of instruction, whether it’s public or private; the voucher system brings in competition that can help to lift the overall quality of both sets of institutions. The flow of money from the government to schools will now follow the principles of the open market—the best-performing schools will get more money as more students enrol, and the underperformers will either have to pull up their socks or go out of business. Nandan envisioned the impact of school vouchers on the educational system as a reform which ‘effectively removes ideology from funding and implementation and makes it easier, say, to hand over management of existing and failing government schools to the private sector, if this will attract students. This can bring the private sector and NGOs into already existing school infrastructure and government school buildings, instead of the current approach where we are constructing an alternative, private school system from scratch.’ Pilot projects have been implemented by some of India’s state governments, as well as by Parth Shah and his team at the Centre for Civil Society.

Aadhaar can be used in the creation of a central registry and voucher-issuance platform for schools and students. Students can be registered in the system using their Aadhaar numbers. Vouchers can then be issued against the Aadhaar number of the students, and parents can use these to enrol their children at a school of their choice. Section 12 of the RTE mandates that private and unaided schools set aside 25 per cent of their total enrolment capacity for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and that such students should be given free and compulsory education up to the elementary level. This provision of the RTE Act gives us an opportunity to create a voucher system, where poor families are issued school vouchers that can be used by parents to match children to schools in the same way that students are matched to engineering or medical colleges upon completion of standard twelve.
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Lastly, we would like to turn our attention to the question of de-materialization of degrees and skill certificates. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already announced a Digital Locker initiative in which a person’s important records, including educational certificates, will be stored securely in the cloud and can be accessed by government departments as needed.
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Fake resumes are circulating in the job market to an alarming degree, with an estimated one in five resumes in the IT industry being falsified.
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People go so far as to set up fake companies that can provide experience certificates to jobseekers, helping them to inflate their expertise and skills when job-hunting.
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A de-materialized degree combined with Aadhaar-based identification serves as a guarantee for the person’s educational qualifications, increasing trust between jobseekers and potential employers. Individuals no longer have to get copies of their degree certificates attested and notarized, removing the friction generated by the need to authenticate paper copies of documents.