Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) is world’s most extensive primary education programme, but is it working? The grim reality that India’s Right to Education is at best working in terms of quantity of schools, and certainly not in terms of quality of education, was first proved in successive Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER), brought out by education NGO ‘Pratham’ through nationwide ground-level surveys. Now a Planning Commission evaluation report confirms most...

Government policy towards school education is schizophrenic. While on the one hand, it is working on rules to set up, to begin with, 2,500 public private partnership schools as a means to see how it can increase private sector involvement in providing education to the underprivileged (economically or socially) in a bigger way; on the other, it is all set to virtually nationalise elementary education in the country through the...

Balaiah, a Dalit farmer in drought-affected Mahabubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh wanted a decent, English-medium education for his son that earned him a white-collar, job. However, as part of this quest, in the last three years, his son Shekhar had shifted five schools — all private English-medium schools with fees ranging from Rs 50 to Rs 550 per month. Despite attending school regularly, Shekhar’s efforts to learn seemed to fail...

While the human resources development ministry is currently focused on weeding out poor-quality private education providers in the higher education space, a very different picture obtains as far as primary and secondary education is concerned. At a time when the government is almost certainly going to increase expenditure on the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) and is still working on the costs of the Right to Education (RTE) Bill, the findings...

Tuition is seen as a minimum requirement for any kind of achievement in our academic scene, which is marked by competitive pressure and high aspirations. ONE of the more remarkable features of our education system is the way it has allowed and even encouraged the proliferation of private tuition outside the regular school system. This is something relatively unique to India, as it is not found to this extent even...