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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Thanks to Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and Anganwadi system, more and more village girls are going to school -Abheek Barman

Thanks to Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and Anganwadi system, more and more village girls are going to school -Abheek Barman

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published Published on Sep 28, 2013   modified Modified on Sep 28, 2013
-The Economic Times


As elections approach and the campaign gets shriller, the UPA and opposition parties are in the market for talking points to pin each other down. The BJP gloats that it created more jobs in its five years than UPA-I managed to create between 2004 and 2009.

This is correct: between 1999-2000 and 2004-05 when the BJP was in power, the total number of jobs went up by a little more than 60 million. Between 2004-05 and 2009-10, the rise was a paltry 2.76 million. The difference looks dramatic, but some of the drama is based on a statistical error.

Since nobody has the time and technology to go around and ask 1.2 billion Indians what they do for a living, economy-wide job numbers are compiled after sampling a fairly large number of people - around 4,57,000 - and then projecting what they do for the entire population. Population numbers are measured by the censuses, where every Indian is counted. Unfortunately, the censuses take place once every 10 years.

So, we know what India's population was in 2001 and what it was in 2011, two census years. But between 2001 and 2011, the government took what it thought is the average population growth rate and added that tothe next year, to get an approximation of the population. Well, those estimates of the population were wrong by a biggish amount.

India's population in 2011 was underestimated by a little more than 18 million. That's a bit more than all the folks in the Netherlands.

The lower the population numbers, the lower will be the number of jobs projected on to it. On July 27, Abhishek Shaw showed in The Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) that with correct population numbers, the 2009-10 job numbers would actually go up by more than four million. The UPA-I, therefore, added around seven million jobs in its tenure, not the less-than-three-million number estimated earlier.

The pace of job creation has since picked up: in 2011-12, more than nine million new jobs were added.

Office Chair to School Bench

Away from banal TV debates, the question is what's causing the slowdown in the job market? Numbers show an interesting thing: over time, more and more Indians - especially women - are opting out of jobs. Is this the result of discrimination, or is it because more and more girls, who would otherwise have started working, are opting to study, instead?

Writing in the EPW on August 3, economist Vinoj Abraham found that it was a bit of both.

With all the women streaming in and out of offices and data centres, you'd imagine that the proportion of urban working women would have shot up in the last 40 years.

But, no, Abraham finds that in cities, the proportion of working women has actually fallen, from a little more than 14% in 1972-73 to a little more than 13% in 2011-12. But the real drama is in our villages, where the proportion of women at work has shrunk from 32% to 18% in the same time, a near-halving. Why?

He finds that as rural incomes increase, women are taken out of the workforce. In families that are landless or have tiny slivers of land, between 40% and 19% of women work. Only 3.3% of women work in families that have more than 4 hectares of land. So, the richer you are, the better you can afford the prejudices of caste and patriarchy that frown on working women.

But there is a hugely positive story too, one for which the Congress can claim all credit. Today, thanks to efforts like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and the Anganwadi system, more and more girls in our villages are going to school and opting to study longer years.

S for Study

In 1983, around 29% of village girls between 5 and 15 years old were in school. By the time they turned 16, this dropped dramatically to 4%. Only 0.6% of village women continued into colleges and higher studies between the age of 21 and 25.

By 2009-10, the beginning of the UPA's second term in office, these numbers had changed dramatically for the better.

That year, 85% of village girls aged 5 to 15 went to primary school, 35% went to high school, and more than 4% of girls between 21-25 years of age continued with higher studies.

Writing on the Blackboard

This is an amazing achievement, one that India can boast of to the rest of the world, but that, strangely, has slipped below the radar of public discourse. That's not all. Abraham's study shows that this near-universal education for village girls cuts across all income groups. In 1983, 38% of the girls from the wealthiest families and only 9.2% of the poorest families went to primary school.

In 2009-10, more than 63% of better-off village girls were in school. And even from families that were the poorest tenth of the village population, a staggering 52% of girls were in primary school. Much of this must have been made possible by the floor under rural wages that the NREGA helped to set.

Today, I can't wait for the momentous social, economic and institutional changes that this bunch of educated young ladies will force on India in the next years and decades.


The Economic Times, 27 September, 2013, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/comments-analysis/thanks-to-sarva-shiksha-abhiyaan-and-anganwadi-system-more-and-more-village-girls-are-going-to-sch


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