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The education system in India is rotting from within. According to news reports, in the Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh (pop. 166 million), school teachers routinely pay bribes for temporary suspension. During the period of suspension, even as they continue to receive half pay, they are free to do other work. After the suspension period is over, they get their jobs and accrued pay back. The going bribe amount is Rs.25,000-50,000 per suspension. And since suspension is no stigma, it becomes a fully-paid year-long sabbatical!
Such mockery of the education system is quite common in institutions of learning in the Hindi belt. There are at least 1,000 teachers who have scammed the system to enrich themselves by manipulating temporary suspensions, according to media reports streaming out of India.
Survey after survey has shown that a majority of teachers in India don’t teach. The broad consequence is that the percentage of illiterates in contemporary India is higher than in many sub-Saharan countries such as Uganda, Rwanda, and Malawi. In 1996, the Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE) conducted a survey of 234 randomly selected villages in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh and found that 33 percent of teachers were absent when PROBE investigators visited schools, and of those present, only a third were engaged in teaching activities.
A decade later in 2006, the PROBE team re-visited the same schools. While it obser-ved improvements on several fronts such as student enrolment and institutional infrastructure, teacher absenteeism hadn’t declined. According to a report of the PROBE team, published in The Hindu, teachers come late and leave early. “Even when they are present they are not necessarily teaching. In half of the sample schools, there was no teaching activity at all when the investigators arrived — in 1996 as well as in 2006.”
The PROBE surveys indicate that in the ten years since their first survey in 1996, the demand for education has increased; and society has also raised investment in infrastructure. The only factor that has remained unchanged is teacher truancy. In 2006, an additional 21 percent of schools were functioning as single teacher institutions on the day of the survey because of teacher absenteeism.
Teacher truancy should not be lightly dismissed. It adversely affects student enrolment, attendance and learning outcomes. Besides, as a Unesco (2002) study highlights, teacher absenteeism is intimately connected with the economic development of states. Significantly 40 percent of all teachers in Bihar were reported absent as were one-third of all teachers in UP. Not coincidentally these are the most backward states of the country. In contrast, teacher absenteeism rarely exceeds 15 percent in the socio-economically advanced states of Kerala and Gujarat.
The commonly offered explanations for teacher absenteeism such as irregular payment, inexperienced teachers, and time taken to commute to remote areas, are not prime causes of their truancy. Even teachers from local areas had similar absenteeism records. And surprisingly, there isn’t much of a difference between private and public schools.
These bizarre findings lead to a simple conclusion: teachers are absent from school because they can get away with it. They get paid without being present; even those present can get away without teaching because their remuneration doesn’t depend on performance. Lord Krishna’s celebrated observation “Swadharme nidhanam shreya” (death is a better option than escaping one’s duty) recorded in the Bhagwad Gita, is clearly not an ideal of India’s teachers community.
Shockingly too, education is the third most corrupt sector of the Indian economy, according to a Transparency International India (TII) and ORG Marg survey conducted in 2002. The study titled Corruption in India found that teachers forced private tuition onto their students to make the extra buck. Likewise in a TII and Center for Media Studies survey of 14,405 respondents spread across 20 states, covering 151 cities and 306 villages, the picture of the education system that emerged, is far from pretty. As many as 18 percent of households which interacted with educational institutions said they had paid bribes. A third of the bribes paid were in the form of additional school fees, 28 percent were for obtaining school leaving certificates, and 26 percent were admissions related. Inevitably poorest households suffered the most.
What should the society and governments do to inculcate nation-building values of honesty, truthfulness and integrity into the education system? How do we compel teachers to discharge their dharma (duty) and attend classes to teach? What quality of education can shirking teachers provide children?
The aforementioned surveys and studies don’t provide readymade solutions for abatement or elimination of teacher truancy. Yet such blatant neglect of student aspirations and waste of public resources is criminal. It calls for strict corrective action such as unceremonious firing of chronically absentee teachers. But this requires strong administrators with high integrity — top level bureaucrats and politicians who are not complicit.
(Dr. Neeraj Kaushal is associate professor of social work at Columbia University, USA)