Relevance : GS Paper II
Theme of the Article
The systemic approach to transforming education outcomes in India is leading to success.
Adequately Staffed Education Departments
- Among the lakhs of employees on the payrolls of State governments in India, the education department, unarguably, has the largest share of employees.
- Besides frontline service providers (teachers), there are a number of other officials and administrators who form an important part of the educational set-up.
The Haryana Case Study : SAKSHAM
- Education transformation programmes by States run the risk of falling flat, as they are often unaccompanied by a single transformation change road map that all key actors agree upon and work towards.
- However, a successful example of implementing such a road map can be seen in Haryana, which has created a race among its administrative blocks to be declared as ‘Saksham’, i.e. have 80% or more students who are grade level competent.
- If a block is found to be ‘Saksham’, the block officials are recognised by no less than the Chief Minister, and a large-scale ‘show and tell’ event is organised to honour them.
- Further, when all blocks in a district are declared as ‘Saksham’, the entire district is also accorded ‘Saksham’ status.
- More than 90 blocks out of a total of 119 in Haryana have been declared ‘Saksham’ and overall grade competence has been assessed at 80%, which is a giant leap in learning outcomes when compared to the overall grade competence of 40% in 2014.
- Given these early successes, many other States are also embarking on such programmes.
The Lesson Learnt
- The valuable lesson from all this is that inducing competition among administrative units helps invigorate key stakeholders to work in tandem in order to achieve intended outcomes.
- Competition also makes abstract goals such as ‘learning outcomes’ more real by defining exact ‘actionable’ metrics on which improvement is desired.
- Further, with encouragement from above, such campaigns lead to a shift in the mindset of a State’s education administrators, many of whom otherwise believe that high learning outcomes are almost unachievable.
- Political commitment to improving the quality of education backed by strong review and monitoring mechanisms can spur meaningful activity in States.
The Efforts of NITI Aayog Towards Education
- NITI Aayog has developed the State-level ‘School Education Quality Index’ (SEQI), which seeks to make improvements in learning outcomes a focal point of governance.
- The NITI Aayog launched the Aspirational Districts programme in 2018. Here, 112 under-served districts across the country compete with each other in order to achieve targets in five crucial sectors; these include education, which has among a weightage of 30%.
Way Forward
- Right incentive structures for stakeholders lead to administrative efficiency, which then improves the quality of service delivery.
- States therefore need to induce competition and give a boost to put all key actors in education in the driver’s seat to improve their learning levels.
Conclusion
Improvement in learning outcomes is an immediate goal for India to fulfil its aspirations of playing a greater role in the global economy and a systemic transformation is the best solution that we have so far.
