School Education in Crisis, Latest Government Report Reveals
Savera
RECENTLY, the Ministry of Education released reports of school education in 2022-23 and 2023-24 covering a wide range of indicators. These rather delayed reports form a series of similar reports going back to 2005. Earlier the National Institute for Educational Planning & Administration (NIEPA) used to compile these reports but since 2018-19, this task was taken over by the ministry directly. The recent reports are available at the portal of the Unified District Information System of Education (UDISE+) and school-wise details are available at the Know Your School (KYS) portal. They are based on data submitted by the schools.
The recent reports paint a grim picture of the condition of India’s school system which is the biggest in the world with nearly 23.5 crore (235 million) children enrolled in 2023-24. It appears that total enrolment of students in over 14.72 lakh schools covered in the survey has gone down by a shocking 2 crore between 2020-21 and 2023-24 academic years. In 2020-21, over 25.38 crore children were enrolled in classes 1 to 12 in schools across the country. In 2023-24 the enrolment has fallen to 23.5 crore.
Although the two annual reports (released together on December 30, 2024) do not contain any explanation for this fall in enrolment, the given wisdom is that there were many bogus students enrolled in schools, or records were outdated, etc. It is sought to be implied that this was perhaps done to get more funds on various heads like mid-day meals or scholarships, etc. It has been suggested that the establishment of a new digital database system called SDMS (Student Database Management System) by the central government has weeded out bogus students leading to more authentic records and a real picture to emerge.
However, this explanation wears a little thin. The biggest decline takes place in 2022-23 when enrolment falls by 1.41 crore students but then why does it further decline in the next year by 67 lakh? These so called data corrections have been going on for years and it appears to have become a convenient thing for governments to trot them out as excuses for dropping enrolment. It may be recalled that the all-time high of 26.1 crore enrolment was reported in 2015-16 but it fell drastically next year “because of student data collection in sync with UDISE during 2016-17 data collection”, according to leading educationist Prof. Arun C Mehta who founded the school education statistics systems in the modern era at NIEPA.
Other experts have pointed out other more plausible reasons for the decline. These were pandemic years and there was widespread disruption of family life, economic distress and upheavals which could have led to students being withdrawn from schools by families. This would explain the steep drop in 2022-23 compared to 2021-22. But why was there no drop in the previous year (2020-21) which saw the harsh lockdowns? It has also been suggested that the non-payment of pre-matric scholarships to SC/ST students for some time due to supposed authentication issues has also contributed to the fall in enrolment.
More generally, the increasing economic distress, rising costs of education, especially in private schools, the under-funding of government schools and consequent decline in quality of education and even closure of schools, all appear to have squeezed out a large number of students in the past few years. This has affected poorer sections more. That the government’s reports are recording this but not providing any explanation is worrisome – do they have no clue, or is it that they do not care? More importantly, if this fall in enrolment is not on the radar of policy makers then how will it ever be corrected?
There is also the equally worrisome question of what has happened to the over 2 crore children who were in schools but are no longer in it now. What are they doing now? Are they labouring in fields and streets? Isn’t this a violation of the Right to Education Act that lays down that all children up to 14 years of age must be in schools? There is complete silence on the part of the government and its apologists on this count too.
ENROLMENT RATIOS FALL,
DROPOUTS INCREASE
It might be argued that the above discussed drop in enrolment is happening because the total number of schools being covered in government surveys has declined and additionally, the population of children in the various age groups has also fallen. But this does not appear to be substantiated by the enrolment ratios, both, gross and net. Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) is the ratio of total enrolled children at any particular level to the total number of children in the age group that should be studying at that level. For elementary stage, the GER has declined from 99.1 per cent in 2020-21 to 91.7 per cent in 2023-24. For secondary stage, GER has declined from 79.8 per cent to 77.4 per cent in the same period. For higher secondary there is no decline but an increase, from 53.8 per cent to 56.2 per cent.
Net enrolment Ratio (NER) is the ratio of children of a particular age group enrolled in the corresponding stage of education to the total number of children in that age group. The difference between GER and NER is that in the former all enrolled children at a particular stage are counted, including any who are older than the age group specified while in NER only enrolled children of the specific age group are counted. The reports indicate that NER has fallen at all three stages between 2020-21 and 2023-24. At elementary stage, NER dropped from 92.1 per cent to 83.3 per cent; at secondary stage it fell from 52.5 per cent to 48.3 per cent; and at the higher (or senior) secondary stage it fell from 34.7 per cent to 33.8 per cent.
What does this mean? It means that the share of children of each age group that are enrolled in schools at that level has fallen at all three stages. Another dimension is revealed by these NER figures: while enrolment of over 83 per cent is more or less good at the elementary stage, it starts dropping steeply to reach about 48 per cent by secondary stage and then drops further to just short of 34 per cent at the higher secondary stage.
This is confirmed by the rise in dropout rates, which are a measure of the share of students who discontinue school enrolment. Generally, dropout rates have been very low in the primary sections (class 1-5) and somewhat low in upper primary sections (class 6-8). But these rates spiked up in 2022-23, reaching 7.8 per cent for primary sections from just 0.8 per cent in the previous year. Similarly, for upper primary sections, the dropout rate spiked to 8.1 per cent in 2022-23 from 1.9 per cent in the previous year. Subsequently, the dropout rate in primary sections dropped back to 1.9 per cent in 2023-24, which was higher than the earlier trend but still conforming to it broadly. However, in the upper primary sections, dropout rates continued to remain high in 2023-24, at 5.2 per cent. In the secondary stage (class 9-10), dropout rates were always high at 16.1 per cent in 2019-20, and 14.6 per cent in 2020-21. It jumped up to 16.4 per cent in 2022-23 and then settled back at 14.1 per cent next year.
These percentages may look small but if converted to actual numbers their gigantic scale is revealed. Between 2021-22 and 2022-23, adding up all the dropouts at various stages (calculated from rates and total enrolment numbers), it appears that about 2.14 crore children dropped out for all classes from 1 to 12. Similarly, between 2022-23 and 2023-24, another 1.08 crore students dropped out. Although dropout rates have reduced between these two time periods, the sheer number of students dropping out is unconscionably high.
State level data shows that some states have very high dropout rates. Thus, at the secondary level in 2022-23, Bihar had nearly 26 per cent dropout rate, Assam had 25 per cent, Haryana 13.8 per cent, Rajasthan 11 per cent, UP nearly 9 per cent, and Jharkhand over 15 per cent.
CRIMINAL UNDERFUNDING
IS ROOT CAUSE
Besides falling enrolment – and its most severe impact on disadvantaged sections – the school education sector suffers from a host of other problems which needs separate discussion. These include the shortage of teachers, the lack of adequate qualifications/training of teachers, deficient infrastructure, outdated teaching aids, lack of laboratories, computers, internet connections, even electricity, and so on. The root cause of this tragic state of affairs is the severe underfunding of education by the central government which funds and manages many crucial aspects of school education through its schemes. A look at the past few years shows that budget allocations have been 2-3 per cent of the total union budget, and just 0.34 to 0.44 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for each year. This combined with the devaluation and erosion of education and the pushing of high-cost private education for the elite, has severely damaged the country’s education system. The recent reports are another piece of evidence that confirms this fact.
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