Education, Careers & Professional News
Rajasthan Tops The Quality Education Chart
The World Bank has said that in its present form, the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA) has failed to achieve the desired goals.
While presenting the mid-term appraisal of the 10th Five Year Plan of SSA to the Planning Commission on Tuesday, World Bank officials, interestingly, concluded that the level of knowledge of students of fifth standard is lower in Kerala, the state that claims to have 100 per cent literacy, than in Rajasthan.
Education experts from the World Bank, Lant Pritchat and Varad Panday, gave the presentation, where the Planning Commission deputy chairman Mr Montek Singh Ahluwalia and members Mr Abhijit Sen and Mr Kirti S Parikh were present. HRD ministry officials also attended the meeting.
The World Bank officials said though substantial progress had been made, a lot more has to be done to get the targeted results under SSA. Outlining the gains made by SSA, the bank officials said: According to the latest joint review mission of SSA, dropouts from schools have reduced to 13 million in March 2005 from 25 million in 2003.
The number of primary and upper primary schools has also increased over this period of time and even on the front of training, learning materials and structures of academic support, the programme has made progress.
But the bank does not feel that this progress is enough. The presentation revealed that teacher absenteeism in India is substantially higher (25%) than the world average (18%) among developing countries like Zambia, Bangladesh, Peru, and Ecuador.
The presentation also revealed that corruption is creating havoc in Indian education system as it says, In the east and west of India education is among the top three corrupt sectors.
The World Bank has lamented that despite the SSA being in place for quite some time, private schools in both urban and rural areas are expanding at a faster pace.
It is, however, a universal fact that expenditure per pupil in the government sector is higher than in private schools, because of higher salary scales given to government schoolteachers, which is in the ratio of 5:1, it said.
Given the present situation, the World Bank suggested that planners give higher importance to accountability, which would weed out many of the problems plaguing the system.
They also pleaded for greater autonomy and said local responsiveness always worked better.
The bank also concluded that lower wages did not appear to reduce motivation, as, had this been the case, private schools would not have mushroomed