The Annual Status of Education Report, popularly known as ASER had released a report titled ‘Beyond Basics’ in January 2024. The findings of this report were quite surprising, it says that more than 25% of students in the age group of 14 to 18 can’t read a second-grade level text fluently. Furthermore, little more than 40% of students can solve a basic division problem in mathematics and roughly 50% of the student could understand the weight and time. Similarly, according to India's Graduate Skill Index report 2023, only 45% of graduates are employable i.e. they can meet the industry demands.

Prima facie it seems that students are to be blamed for their poor academic performance, but are the students alone responsible? Or is it a collective responsibility of the state? Let’s try to understand.

Indian Education System has certain systematic issues, such as:

1. Issues related to teacher’s appointment.

• Inability to maintain teacher-pupil ratio: According to a UNESCO report India’s teacher-pupil ratio can be majorly divided into two parts i.e. teacher-pupil ratio at school level and at senior secondary level, at school level the ratio is around 1:26 and at senior secondary level the ratio is skewed at 1:47. And, as per data released from Ministry of Education in response to an unstarred question asked by Hon’ble MP Shri. Derek O Brien, India has about 1.17Lakh single teacher school , to put this into perspective, there are 14.89Lakh schools in India. These data simply reflects that there is a resource constraint with respect to hiring of teacher which contributes to high teacher pupil ratio.
• Flawed recruitment procedure: The first response to improve skewed teacher-pupil ratio is by conducting a recruitment drive. In most of the Indian states’ teachers are recruited through a common entrance test where certain numbers of vacancies are notified and an entrance test is conducted based on which recruitment is completed. From a bird eye perspective, the solution seems to be quite easy to implement, but when we analyze implementation data, the situation is grim. Examples, recently High Court of Kolkata cancelled recruitment of more than 24,000 teachers, reason being corruption in recruitment process, the matter is still pending before Supreme court of India, the JBT scam of Haryana unearthed scam through which 3000 teachers were recruited using forged documents and similarly the Bihar’s teacher recruitment process of 2023 is also facing allegation of scams . Fraud in recruitment process is a mirror to society, reflecting the greed for government job and the lengths to which society can go to secure it, whether by using hook or crook.
• Confusion at Policy level: Recently in 2023 the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India settled a dispute regarding appointment of teachers at primary level educational institutions. To understand the issue better, one needs to have information regarding minimum qualification required for the profession, i.e. Bachelor’s of Education (B.Ed) is required for teaching students up to grade 10 or 12 and then there is another specialized degree known as Bachelor’s in Elementary Education (B.El.Ed), focused on pedagogy aspect of teaching students from grade 1 to 5 or grade 1 to 8 (depending upon the guidelines of state government). In 2018, National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) which is under Ministry of Education, Government of India, issued a notification extending the eligibility criteria to B.Ed degree holders as primary school teacher for grade 1 to 5. Later, Rajasthan government issued a recruitment notification for primary school teachers, in which B.Ed degree holders were ineligible for teaching in primary school (Grade 1 to 5). This notification was challenged in Rajasthan High Court, the court upheld ineligibility of B.Ed degree, this order was further challenged in Supreme Court of India and ineligibility was upheld in Supreme Court too and furthermore Supreme Court went ahead and quashed NCTE’s 2018 notification which granted eligibility to B.Ed degree holders. It might seem to be a judgement which cleared an ambiguity between two degrees, but there is an underlying issue which one needs to identify i.e. how come two overlapping courses were designed in first place? And if a special course i.e. B.El.Ed was designed later keeping in mind the pedagogy requirement of imparting education for grade 1 to 5, then how come NCTE issued a simple notification diluting the importance of B.El.Ed? This type of irregularities reflects the inconsistency at policy making level.

These issues at multiple levels in teacher’s appointment ultimately ends up hampering the overall quality of education.

2. Issues relating to operating educational institute

Setting up a private educational institute in India is a bureaucratic hassle, multiple government clearances and good financial resources are required to operate it. This loophole or drawback per se is exploited by local politicians, many a times its observed that these politicians use their connections and influence to get the necessary paperwork approved quickly and since they do not have major issue of finances, they easily construct the required physical infrastructure. It is important to acknowledge that politicians who run educational institute are not always bad or murky, but sometimes these institutes are used as a money minting body.

The famous Mohini Jain judgement of 1992 and Unni Krishnan judgement of 1993 which were essentially a clash between Article 19(1)(g) Right to trade and  Article 21 Right to life. Both of these judgements practically disallowed capitation fees and profiteering from educational institute, these landmark judgments made higher education affordable for many Indians, as a result more and more Indians started to enroll for higher education, but again it had flip side which needs to be discussed. These judgements basically pushed the educational institutes to decouple from profit making, and as a result many educational institutes were unable to increase their capacity or move forward with their expansion plans. As a result of which, genuine stakeholders were unable to meet the educational market demand, which created a demand-supply gap in market and politicians entered the education sector to fill this gap.

3. COVID-19-induced challenges in the educational sector

Pandemic years can be considered as lost years, 2020 to 2022 i.e. for nearly three years students have missed academic sessions, one might say that online lectures were conducted but outcomes of those session can be highly debated since many students and teachers didn’t had the requisites needed for seamless online lectures. Also, pandemic years were not just a disaster for students but for the educational institutes as well, they faced severe financial hardships, for instance, non-payment of fees by students, inability to pay salary of teaching and non-teaching staff, and so on. The combined effect of all these was suffered by the students, especially the ones in secondary and higher secondary grades, this can be better understood with an example, suppose a student was in grade 11 in 2020 when pandemic began, so by the time the academic calendar was normalized in 2022, he/she would be in second year of degree, which effectively means that the candidate had lost the academic terms where foundational subject were taught, though this should not be generalized for every student but it’s true for a vast majority.

Conclusion

To summarize, we have majorly two categories of issues, firstly we have long term issues which need solutions at the policy level and then we have short-term pandemic-induced issues which can be solved by making tailored solutions for different categories of students.

It is essential to solve these issues, as India is aiming to become a global power. We cannot become a global power if we have a substandard quality of education fueled by systematic mismanagement. If we keep continuing the same path then we will end up reading the same reports which has poor statistics related to the education system and youth unemployment, it a high time to reform and stop our demographic dividend from being turned into a demographic burden.

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References:

• ASER. (n.d.). ASER 2023 Beyond Basics.
•  Basu, S. (2023, August 1). Just 45% of India’s graduate jobseekers meet industry needs: Study. The Economic Times.
•  Nanda, P. K. (2021, October 5). India’s school system faces acute shortage of teachers, says Unesco report | Mint. Mint.
• Analyzing the Education Landscape in India: School Numbers, Enrolment & Teacher Distribution (2023) | Education for All in India. (2023, June 19).
• Education, T. (2024, April 25). 24,000 candidates lose jobs as West Bengal HC cancels all appointments: WB teacher recruitment scam explained. The Times of India.
• Staff, F. (2013, January 22). Why Chautala is in jail: All you need to know about JBT scam. Firstpost.
• Ramashankar, & Ramashankar. (2023, October 25). “Money for jobs” allegations mar Bihar’s teacher recruitment exam; Opposition demands probe. The New Indian Express.
• Yearender: Major Changes in Teacher Recruitment Validity in 2023 (2023, December 20). Jagranjosh.com.
• Verma, R. (2020, August 10). Politicians will pose the biggest challenge to NEP. Hindustan Times.
• Restrictions on for-profit education in India | Centre For Civil Society.