(This piece appears in ASER 2014, which was released earlier today in New Delhi; reproduced here by kind permission of the publishers, ASER Centre.)
Ten years ago, an
ambitious and audacious idea was floated – why not have a people’s audit of government
expenditure on education and produce a report for the common man? In a conversation shortly after the 2%
Education Cess was introduced in 2004, I
recall Madhav (Chavan, co-founder and CEO of Pratham) first proposing the
concept, arguing that the people had a right to know where the Cess was being
spent, and how effective it really was. At
the time, I was with the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and
grappling with the concept of the Prarambhik
Shiksha Kosh (PSK), a non-lapsable fund we were trying to convince the
Finance Ministry to create, in order to ensure that Cess revenues remained with
MHRD to support elementary education. In
that context, Madhav’s idea seemed like a good one, but I had no inkling then
of the scale at which he was proposing to execute it.
When it was finally
carried out, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2005 covered some 490
districts and 3.3 lakh children, who were tested by volunteers from all walks
of life, at home, in school, on the streets and in the fields, and just about
everywhere in between. Today the scale
and scope of the reports have widened significantly, but for a first time
exercise, it was bold and unparalleled in scale; quite simply, nobody had ever
attempted anything like it before. Most
striking of all was its intent, captured by the “Preamble” to the report. “We,
people of India, from different states and regions, speaking different
languages, sat with our children and looked within, inside our homes, at our
villages, into our schools, and prepared this report for ourselves, to build a
better India”.[1] This was what set ASER apart from
donor-funded or government surveys – it was a report of the people, by the
people, for the people.
In 2004, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), the
government’s programme for universalising elementary education, was in its
third year of implementation. Our
concerns in MHRD at the time were primarily around provisioning and ensuring
that all children were enrolled in school, in order to meet the first goal of
the programme, viz., all children in
school/EGS centre/bridge course by 2003.
It was already evident that the 2003 enrolment milestone had not been
met, and all our efforts were thus concentrated on catching up. When the findings of ASER 2005 were shared
with us, some days before the formal release of the report, it was heartening
to learn that the survey had estimated that just over 93% children of the
appropriate age group were enrolled in school; this accorded well with the data
being reported by the states, and seemed to indicate that SSA was having a
successful impact on the ground.
The focus of most of
the debate after ASER 2005 was more on the national enrolment figures; learning
levels had also been tested, and the results did not fully match either popular
perception, or the available NCERT data.
Later reports, treating the question of enrolment as more or less
settled, have emphasised learning levels of children, testing among other
things, to see where they stand, and exploring the differences, if any, between
public and private schools. These
reports have also examined the availability of facilities in schools vis-à-vis those
mandated by the Right to Education Act, and collected some basic economic
information about households, such as possession of mobiles and TVs, etc.
The numbers coming out
of the ASER 2005 survey also validated the results of another study
commissioned by government and carried out by IMRB.[2] The latter study estimated that some 1.34
crore or 6.94% children were then out of school, which approximated the ASER
estimates of 1.4 crore or 6.6%. The
importance of the ASER results lay of course, in the fact that unlike the IMRB
exercise which had been funded by government, they were an independent and
non-partisan estimation. While the IMRB
report could conceivably be questioned as a "government statistic",
the results of ASER were not so easily open to multiple interpretations. Both the IMRB report and ASER 2005 were used
extensively by government to provide evidence of the impact and effectiveness
of its universalisation programme, at least in terms of improved enrolment
figures.
While the enrolment
data emerging from ASER has generally been viewed as encouraging, this has not
always been the case with figures related to learning. NCERT and several state governments disputed
many of the findings, questioning both the methodology and the process adopted
to determine learning outcomes. In some cases,
the hostility extended to actively banning Pratham from working with their
schools, a challenge the latter overcame by working directly with village
communities instead.
Somewhere around the
fifth ASER report, a suggestion was made that perhaps there should be fewer
reports; possibly one report every 2-3 years instead of a regular annual
publication. Many others who work in
this sector no doubt shared my relief that this was one suggestion Pratham did
not accept. An annual ASER exercise and
report have now become an integral part of the education landscape, serving to
educate and inform stakeholders in the system and the public at large.
What impact has ASER
had on the Indian education environment?
First, just the introduction of the concept of a "people's audit of
education" was a game changer in itself; the People's Report on Basic
Education (PROBE) was a one-off exercise and had not, at the time, been
repeated, nor was it anything like ASER in its scope. ASER reports have regularly held up a mirror
to society, informing us of how much (or how little) our children have gained
in terms of improved education levels, access to better schooling, and removal
of inequities. Note that its original
purpose has not changed – ASER is still aimed at anyone who has an interest in
education, not just policy makers or academics or other standard stakeholders
in the system.
Second, the single
most significant finding of ASER year after year has been the fact that
learning levels across the country, whether in public or private school, have
not improved. Clearly, even after
spending crores of rupees on delivering a Right to Education, our efforts have
not succeeded as well as they should have; the policy prescription for shifting
attention away from inputs to outcomes could not be clearer.
Third, and directly as
a result of the above finding, ASER has succeeded in bringing the issue of
learning centrestage; from a focus on ensuring that children are enrolled in
school and that adequate infrastructural and teaching facilities are provided
to them, the debate has now moved to a place where inputs are assumed, but the
interest is in outcomes. For the first
time, the 12th Five Year Plan acknowledged that "there is a need for a
clear shift in strategy from a focus on inputs and increasing access and
enrolment to teaching learning process and its improvement in order to ensure
adequate appropriate learning outcomes”,[3]
explicitly agreeing that a more-of-the-same approach focused only on
provisioning will not necessarily work.
While there will always be discussion around methodological approaches
and whether ASER follows this or that method as opposed to others, the fact is
that successive ASER reports have compelled us all to sit up and take notice of
what is really happening inside schools.
Additionally, ASER has
pushed both the central and state governments into commissioning their own
assessments and analyses of the status of education in their schools, often in
a move to defend policy and/or practice.
In many cases, these assessments do not produce the same results as
ASER, partly since they are not comparable in terms of what is measured and who
is covered, and there is often much controversy and hand wringing over the
discrepancies, yet it is a moot point if such assessments would today be
considered so essential if public perception had not been influenced so
profoundly by ASER.
Fourth, ASER has been
successful in highlighting an important trend in school enrolment – from only
16% children enrolled in private schools when ASER 2005 was carried out, the
percentage has increased to nearly 30% in the last report. Present trends seem to indicate that this
number will increase to 50% by the end of the current decade. Given that this
increase has taken place in rural
areas, where much of the money spent on SSA and other programmes has been
concentrated, this is not an encouraging development, and is one that merits
serious reflection on the part of policy makers.
What should one now
expect after a decade of this exercise? Ideally, the annual reports should continue to
raise the uncomfortable questions that they do today. Perhaps there is now a case for a somewhat
more sophisticated analysis of learning; not necessarily one that substitutes
for say, a PISA or TIMSS, but one that develops a more rigorous indigenous
model of assessment, feeding even more closely into policy making and thus potentially
making a difference to learning in schools.
For there is no doubt that unless we get this piece right, any illusions
of benefiting from a "demographic dividend" in the future are
unlikely to be realised.
Personally, I would
also like to see greater dissemination of the results of the report, not just
at the time of its release, but continuously through the year. Pratham and ASER Centre have of course, been
disseminating the results at district and State levels all these years, but
what we need in this country is a continuous and sustained debate about the
education of our children. Data from
ASER is used regularly by the media to illustrate their reports; perhaps the
next question to ask could be around ways to deepen this engagement in order to
keep a discussion going.
Whatever direction the
report takes in the coming years, ASER can rightly claim the credit for having changed,
over the course of the last decade, the manner in which school education is
discussed and understood in India; for that one achievement alone, Pratham deserves
our thanks.
[1] Pratham Resource Centre, Mumbai, Annual Status of Education Report (ASER)
2005 – Rural, 2006.
[2] http://bit.ly/1xCn3RO accessed 31.12.2014
[3]
Planning Commission, Government of India, Twelfth
Five Year Plan (2012-2017) – Faster, More Inclusive and Sustainable Growth,
Vol III, 2012.
