Education in India: World Bank
response By Venita Kaul and Kin Bing
Wu
We are writing in response to the article
titled Literacy beats out education in
India published in your paper on April 24.
The article contains a number of serious factual errors
that need to be corrected for the readers.
First
and foremost, the article has completely understated the
role of the Indian union and state governments in the
provision and financing of education, and hugely
misstated the influence of the World Bank. In the five
decades since independence, total public expenditure on
education in India, which includes both the union and
the states' shares, increased over fourfold, from under
1 percent to over 4.3 percent of gross domestic product,
above the threefold increase of the population from 361
million to 1 billion. All levels of education have seen
increased spending in real terms, while elementary
education has seen stronger growth than others. In 2002,
total public expenditures on elementary education in
India reached US$7.5 billion. The recently announced
project that supports Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) will
add another $3.5 billion up to 2007. Of this amount, the
government of India (GOI) and states will finance $2.45
billion or 70 percent, the World Bank's share of $500
million only accounts for 14 percent, and the European
Commission and the United Kingdom's Department for
International Development together for 16 percent. The
bank's support is emphatic on the need to increase
government spending on elementary education, the exact
opposite of imposing expenditure cuts in the education
or health sector as charged by the article.
Second, SSA was designed by the GOI and has been
in implementation for two years before the external
partners were approached to discuss financing for
scaling up the program. The GOI's "SSA Framework for
Implementation" in which the targets and norms were
spelled out, the system of micro-planning, appraisal and
approval of district and state plans, and the monitoring
and evaluation framework were already in place before
the first joint mission of the external partners in June
2003. The external partners have bought into an ongoing
program. The support is for a full cycle of eight years
of elementary education, not five or three years. The
closing date of the recently announced project on
December 31, 2007, does not signal the end of support,
but the potential beginning of a follow-on operation
with additional resources over and above the current
credit.
Third, it is incorrect to state that
various education programs have been wound up. In fact,
several centrally sponsored schemes in elementary
education, such as Operations Blackboard and District
Primary Education Projects, were not terminated, but
rather brought under one umbrella program called SSA. So
actually the various programs were integrated to achieve
better synergy.
Fourth, it's misleading to say
that SSA will replace the regular formal schools with
low-quality, low-budget parallel streams of primary
education for the educationally deprived children. There
is no attempt to replace regular schools, but rather to
supplement them with more facilities in parallel streams
in a transitional period, with the aim of mainstreaming
children in future. Furthermore, the parallel streams
were not part of any structural adjustment program but
were started in some states which came to be viewed as
potential transitional strategies to achieve universal
elementary education within a very short time.
Fifth, it is factually wrong to say that the aim
of the project is "to get children to enroll in school,
rather than an effort to empower them through
education". The project's development objectives are:
(i) To expand enrollment and to reduce the number of
out-of-school children; (ii) To narrow the existing
gender and social gaps; and (iii) To improve the quality
of education. The strategies to universalize elementary
education include building new schools and extension,
hiring new teachers, and supporting interventions to
enroll out-of-school children. The strategies to narrow
the gender and social gaps include provision of free
school textbooks to girls and students from
disadvantaged backgrounds, gender-sensitive
interventions and grants to students with disabilities.
To improve quality, the strategies include provision of
teacher training, school grants and teacher grants,
establishment of block and cluster resource centers, and
supporting of innovative activities. Empowerment is the
ultimate outcome of education, and alleviation of
poverty is the mission of the World Bank.
Venita Kaul is senior education
specialist and Kin Bing Wu is senior education
economist for the World Bank Group.
May 1, 2004
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