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I had a bad dream the other night. I dreamed I was in a desert and I had been there for
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a week without food or water. I was hungry. I was thirsty. I was craving for social media
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because my phone battery had also died a week ago. But all around me there was only an expanse
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of sand. The blistering desert wind burnt my skin. The soles of my foot felt like leather.
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And just as the sun radiated heat, my throat radiated pain. I needed water. Just then,
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in the distance, I saw a stall. A stall? In the middle of the desert? I ran towards the
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stall. Or rather, I stumbled towards the stall, like a kid in a sack race in school. I reached
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the stall and there was a sign on it that said, The Right to Water Act, India. RTW.
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But there was no one in the stall. There was no attendant. There were no bottles of water.
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It was empty. The wind was howling. And for a few moments, I got down on my knees and
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howled with the wind. And then, I pulled out a plank of wood from the stall and started
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Bhatma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, my weekly podcast on the seen and unseen effects of
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public policy. My topic for discussion today is the Right to Education Act. Now, the Right
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to Education Act sounds beautiful and was framed with the best intentions. But we judge
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public policy not by intentions, but by their outcomes. To discuss the unseen effects of
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the Right to Education, I have with me on the show today Vivek Kaul. Vivek is a journalist
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who has worked at DNA and the Economic Times, among other papers, and is currently a columnist
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at Equity Master. He is the author of the Easy Money trilogy and his most recent book
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is India's Big Government, The Inclusive State and How It's Hurting Us, published by Equity
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Master. Vivek, welcome to the show.
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Thanks for having me over, Amit.
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Vivek, just by the name of it, the Right to Education sounds so wonderful. What's wrong
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Oh, I mean, it's wrong at multiple levels. So basically, you know, to give you a little
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bit of background, I mean, India got its independence in 1947. And somewhere in the mid-50s, a gentleman
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called P. C. Mahalanobis, who worked as the honorary statistical advisor to the Government
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of India came onto the scene. And he was very close to the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal
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Nehru. And between him and Nehru, we came up with what is called as the Second Five
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Year Plan. And at the heart of the Second Five Year Plan was this idea to essentially
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build public sector enterprises and huge projects. So we ended up, you know, we had, we built
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steel plants, we built huge dams, so on and so forth. So the idea was to unleash economic
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growth through industrial expansion, built and financed by the government. Now, when
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the government went about building these, you know, projects, they needed people who
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could build these projects and who could eventually run and manage it. So the focus, because of,
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you know, what I call the Nehru-Mahalanobis model in my new book, was on higher education.
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And you know, in the process, we ended up setting the Indian Institute of Technologies
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at I think five different places initially, then we set up the IIMs.
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Temples of Higher Learning. Temples of Higher Learning to sort of manage
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the temples of modern India, as all these projects were called as. And what happened
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in the process was that primary education, which should have been very, very important
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for a newly independent nation, got totally ignored. And as a result, even now, I mean,
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the latest figures that are available are as per the 2011 census, we have a literacy
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rate of only 74%. Now, the issue there is that even that 74% does not, you know, it
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may sound quite a lot, but it does not essentially reflect the reality of the day. Now, one point
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is that we still have the highest number of illiterate people in the world. And the second
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point is that the literacy number does not give you an idea of the number of years an
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average Indian spends in school. Now, an average Indian spends around 5.4 years in school.
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For men, it's 7.2 years. For women, it's 3.6 years. So, an average Indian essentially
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studies up until what we call the primary level, class fifth, class fourth. And all
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this is because of the Nehru-Mahalanobis model, which concentrated on only higher education.
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The other point is that we still have around 28 crore illiterate people, which is the highest
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in the world when it comes to, you know, absolute numbers. And it is really a shame that, you
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know, 70 years after independence, you know, so many people continue to be illiterate.
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Now, somewhere, you know, at the turn of the century, the politicians of this country rightly
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realized that primary education needs to be encouraged and things which have gone wrong
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for so long need to be corrected. So, over a period of time between 2002 and 2009, you
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know, the parliament ended up passing the right to education. And right to education
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came into full force on April 1st, 2010. Now, it essentially makes right to education a
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fundamental right and free and compulsory education needs to be made available to children
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or other, you know, individuals between the age of 6 and 14 at a neighborhood school.
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Now, this is the basic premise. So, you know, like a lot of government ideas, the premise
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is good. I mean, children do need to go to school. But there are a lot of other things
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which come with it, which have essentially led to a situation where the learning outcomes
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of children have actually started to fall. Now, if I may sort of give you some data here
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from my book, you know, in 2010, 48% of children in standard 3 could read at least standard
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1 text. Okay, that is not a great number to have. But even that by 2014 had fallen to
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around 40.3%. Okay. And similarly, if you look at, you know, other learning outcomes,
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you know, the ability to do math, which has fallen dramatically, or the ability to read
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a single sentence in English. So, all these learning outcomes have come down. And the
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funny thing is that they have come down much more dramatically in case of government schools,
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schools run by this, you know, primarily the state governments. Now, why has this happened
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is a question worth asking. Before we get to that, I just want to rewind a bit to talk
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about the journey which brought us to the RTE. So I used to write a fair bit about education
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maybe a decade ago before the RTE. And learning outcomes were absolutely abysmal back then.
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And there were a number of reasons for that ways in which the government had messed up.
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And it doesn't just have to do with not giving primary education enough importance, but the
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way the whole education system was structured. I mean, we have a scene in the Unseen episode
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with Pat Shah. So if you go into our archives, you can check that out. And among the many
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things that were wrong is that A, the private sector was heavily discouraged and this incentivized
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from setting up private schooling. So providing education for a profit motive was more or
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less banned through a panoply of crazy laws in the country.
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It is still banned. And there were an are an insane web of regulations that private schools
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had to comply with, like your playground size must be this much. This is your, you know,
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you must have this many toilets and so on, which a lot of low cost private schools like
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those which would spring up in slums and so on would not be able to cater to. And therefore
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they were operating at the edge of, I mean, they were essentially illegal, kept liable
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to be shut down anytime. And so that's the way it was. And at the same time, outcomes
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in government schools are miserable because there was no accountability. Competition brings
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accountability. They didn't face any competition. And therefore you had terrible outcomes with
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rampant teacher absenteeism, where up to 35% of teachers on any given day at any government
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schools in India are simply not there. If there are two teacher schools, like you've
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pointed out in your excellent chapter in your book, you'll often find the two teachers in
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a two teacher school just alternating and the two of them never being there at the same
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time because there's no accountability. And because of that, you often had a situation
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where a desperately poor family in a slum, let's say someone's an auto driver, instead
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of sending his kid to a government school, which is free with a midday meal, he would
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send them to a low cost private school because even though he had to pay for it out of his
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hard earned money, he would still feel that his child was getting a better quality of
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education there. And obviously the choice should have been his. So now these are all
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the sort of structural problems that you would expect a government to take into account and
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fix with whatever the reform was. And none of that happened, right?
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So basically, if you look at the right to education, it is very, very input driven.
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So essentially, as you said, a private school needs to have a boundary wall. If it doesn't
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have a boundary wall, it needs to be fenced. So it needs a certain number of toilets. It
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needs, you know, library books. So it's extremely input driven. But that is one problem because
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a lot of these private schools, especially the low cost ones, obviously are not in a
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position to fulfill, you know, these things. Now, if you look at, if you look at data,
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you know, an average, and this is, I think, as per, you know, I think NSS data, but an
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average private school, the fee in urban areas is around 416 rupees or something. And it's
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300 rupees in rural areas. Now, at that level, expecting them to have all these, you know,
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all this infrastructure is a little difficult. That's one part.
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The other major problem with RTE is that it expects the teachers to finish the syllabus.
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Okay. Now there is a, you know, if you read the bear act, there is a line in it in which,
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you know, the line, which clearly says the teachers need to cover the syllabus during
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the course of the year. And which is where the entire problem starts. You know, first
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thing is that teachers are absent. Okay. Now teachers, if you look at different kinds of
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data are absent from 15 to 25% of the time. Now, other than that, students are also absent.
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You know, the interesting bit is that, you know, the probability of the student and the
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teacher being there in the class on the same day is very, very low. So students are also
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absent 35%, 30, 35% is the average rate. And students, and it's like a chicken and egg
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story. So students, why are students absent? I mean, there is research that's been done
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in that area as well. Students are absent because teachers are absent. That's one reason.
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The other reason is that, you know, schools are not in the neighborhood or there is some
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work at home. You know, if someone is ill, if a man in a family is ill, then the boy
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who goes to school is then sent to the field. If a woman is ill, then the girl is not sent
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to school. She's sent into the kitchen. And what is also, you know, problematic is that
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the entire focus of teaching in India is in and around rote learning. Okay. So all these
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factors, you know, when, when they sort of mix up lead to a situation where the learning
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outcomes are not too good and they have been falling dramatically since the right to education
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became the order of the day. Now, the interesting thing is, you know, a few years back, I happened
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to interview this gentleman called Abhijit Banerjee. And then I also heard him speak
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at a literature festival. Who's written the book Poor Economics. Poor Economics. I mean,
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he and his, now his wife Esther Duflo wrote the book Poor Economics. They are both economists
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at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So he made a very interesting point. And he
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said that, you know, he had carried out a small experiment in Bihar where the teachers
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were basically trained for some time not to come teach the syllabus, but to teach the
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students what they did not know. So if a student did not know what to, you know, how to write,
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he was taught how to write. If he did not know how to read, he was taught how to read.
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If he did not know basic maths, he was taught basic maths. And over a period of time, the
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results were very, very good. The students who were sort of laggards caught up with the
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students who were doing well. So there is experimental evidence which shows that if,
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you know, during the initial years, if we do not teach, you know, history and geography
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and everything else, you know, let's say in the initial three to four years and concentrate
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on teaching the students what they need to know instead of trying to complete the syllabus,
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you can actually improve the learning outcomes. Now, you know, there's a very interesting
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paragraph in my book, which, you know, which I'd just like to read out. And this is something
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that Abhijit Banerjee said at a literature festival a few years back. And I happened
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to be there and I recorded it. And he says, the reason was that they were asked to do
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a job that actually made sense. They were asked to teach children what they did not
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know. The usual jobs teachers are asked to do is to teach the syllabus, which is very
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different. Under the Right to Education Act, every year you are supposed to cover the syllabus.
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I mean, as I said, it doesn't matter whether the children understand anything. Think of
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all the standard for children who can't read. They are learning social studies and all kinds
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of other wonderful things, except that they can't read. They are learning nothing. They
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are sitting in a class watching some movie in some foreign language without subtitles.
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Hence dropout rates are high. And I'm shocked why anybody comes to school at all. Okay.
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The problem of education has a perfectly good solution. In the first four years, we should
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prioritize the learning of basic skills. Forget about learning the history of the country,
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etc. You don't have to know who Gandhi Ji was for the first four years. Let's just concentrate
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on students being able to read and do simple maths. I think that such a system would deliver
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The other interesting thing is that, again, this has got to do with the way the syllabus
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is structured. When a student joins standard one, when the RT actually comes in, he doesn't
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come from a very text heavy environment. The chances are that his parents are illiterate,
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his or her parents are illiterate, or they perhaps barely went to school. Whereas the
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syllabus of RTE is so designed that, rather the syllabi across various states are so designed
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that all the reading, the reading part of teaching comes to an end by standard one.
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Now, for people who do not come from a text heavy environment, this is extremely, extremely
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criminal. Now, if I could read out a paragraph from a report put out by Acer, it's the annual
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status of education report of 2013, in which they say that analysis of different standard
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one textbooks across states reveals many underlying assumptions related to content, method, pace.
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At age five, children's ability to learn needs to be scaffolded well, but in most states
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in standard one, curriculum covers a great deal of content very quickly, so that many
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children get left behind even before they get started.
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And again, something that Ashtar Duflo also said, by the end of grade one, they are supposed
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to be done with reading. It's a complete fantasy. Learning is not about enrollment,
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teacher-student ratio, or having latrines in schools. It's about if we are serious about
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learning. And the way our education system is structured and the way the right to education
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is structured, the focus is clearly not on learning. It's on completing the syllabus.
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That's actually a very profound and poignant insight. I mean, just the thought of a class
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full of kids not being able to understand what is taught is incredibly sad.
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And you know, there is one point that I forgot that RTE essentially ensures that everybody
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gets promoted. So, you know, here you are, you probably don't even know how to read,
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but because there are no exams, you know, you've reached class five or class six.
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Which is not doing a favor to the kid. It's stopping him from learning and one day he
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has to write exams. What will he do on that day? And that's why the dropout rates are
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and this it also, I think, has enormous issues of self-esteem on the poor kids who have to
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go through this. In fact, you know, it's very, very, you know,
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some time back I sort of, I was at the passport office. I mean, I got my passport made some
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seven, eight months back and I had a very, you know, very, very, I mean, I mean, interesting
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is not, not the right word, but it wasn't something that I was expecting at that point
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of time. So I had gone there because there's some police verification had raised some issues
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and so I mean, I'd gone to sort that out. And there's this, you know, well-dressed guy,
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you know, wearing a pair of sunglasses and has a smartphone in his hand going around,
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you know, requesting something to people and everybody, you know, sort of asked him to
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sort of go away. And then he finally came to me and I realized that essentially what
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he was asking was, you know, asking people to write an application. I mean, there was
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a certain problem in his passport application and an application, you know, needed to be
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written explaining as to what the scene was and nobody was willing to do it for him. So
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I said, so I wrote out an application for him in English and I explained it to him that
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this is what I've written. So I said, then I asked him, you know, so you know, a metric
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pass guy, which is basically 10 standard and not being able to write an application. And
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it's not like you have to write an application in English. You can write an application in
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any language you're comfortable with. So, you know, he could have written an application
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in Hindi and it would have been processed. Now, if, if, and obviously, I mean, this is
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a one-off example, but you know, a guy who's passed his 10th standard and cannot put together
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an application, I mean, that is really a very sad reflection of our education scenario.
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It's illustrative. And I mean, and just going back to the whole thing of syllabi and the
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way the education curriculum is designed in a top-down way from the center seems to me
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a big failing. I mean, what I would imagine would work best is if you just allow the market
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to function the way it should, where you have inputs and natural feedback from parents and
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accordingly schools spring up to satisfy those specific demands.
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So basically, you know, the problem is that we have always tried to address issues from
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the supply side and not from the demand side. Now from, from the demand side, how would
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things work? Things would work if there is some competition between schools to attract
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kids. Right. And that would work if, you know, instead of having free schools, free government
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schools, we would have a sort of a voucher based system where in, you know, we give cash
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or, you know, vouchers, the schools have to compete where schools have to compete. And,
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you know, so it will be very obvious, you know, there will be data for parents to see
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as to where students are doing well. And then accordingly, they would, you know, try and
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get their children admitted in those schools. And then those schools would get the money
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that the parents have. But, you know, obviously nothing of that sort is really going to happen
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anytime soon. So, I mean, I knew the educational system was broken, but what has come as an
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insight to me in this conversation was just that one aspect of the RTE, the insistence
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that teachers have to finish their curriculums and that there are no exams for kids to go
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ahead can have such a drastically bad impact on learning outcomes and actually cause many
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people to drop out more than they otherwise would. What are the other sort of unseen effects
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of the RTI? I mean, it's a mammoth law. So, yes, it is. You know, the other unseen
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effect is, you know, between in the period of 10 years to 2015, close to 10 crore individuals
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have passed out of the Indian education system who cannot, you know, do basic reading, writing
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or some amount of basic maths. Now, this is a number that has, you know, has been put
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out by a gentleman called Madhav Chauhan, who is the president of the Pratham Education
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Foundation, which does these annual status of education reports every year. I mean, that
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is the most comprehensive document, the most well-researched document coming out on the
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Indian education system. So, you know, when you have 10 crore individuals who have passed
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through who are literate, okay, and but they can't, you know, read, they can't write and
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they can't do basic maths. So, then their ability to find a half decent job goes down
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dramatically. So, what we call a demographic dividend, you know, basically, you know, every
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month, 1 million individuals are entering the workforce. So, which means 1.2 crore Indians,
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you know, new individuals are entering the workforce every year. And this is likely to
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continue over a period of next one and a half to two decades. Now, one is, you know, when
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these individuals are not, do not have their basic educational outcomes in place, you know,
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what sort of a job can they really expect at the end of the day? So, that is another
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huge unseen effect of, you know, right to education.
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It just goes to show that getting education wrong impact society at all levels. And I'd
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like to discuss this more with you. So, in the next episode, let's talk about jobs.
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We're going to take the natural leap from education to jobs, but that's in the next
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episode. Do come back next week and do hop over to sceneunseen.in, where you can browse
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previous episodes, including episode nine, which I had recorded with Parth Shah on the
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profit motive in education. Goodbye for now.
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Next week on The Scene and the Unseen, Amit Verma will be talking to Vivek Kaul about
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jobs. For more, go to sceneunseen.in.
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If you enjoyed listening to The Scene and the Unseen, check out another hit show from
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Indusworks Media Network's Cyrus Says, which is hosted by my old colleague from MTV, Cyrus
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Brocha. You can download it on any podcasting network.
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Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain speaking. Sorry to say, but there's
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been a slight delay due to the apocalypse having suddenly begun. As you can see, there's
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death, destruction and chaos taking place all around us. But don't you worry, food and
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drinks will be served shortly. And I would recommend checking out IVM Podcasts to get
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some of your favorite Indian podcasts. We'll keep you going till this whole thing blows
