For the Congress-led UPA-II government at the Centre, already reeling under the impact of a string of corruption scandals, the Annual Status of Education Report 2010 (ASER 2010) compiled by the highly-respected Mumbai-based NGO Pratham (estb.1994) and formally released in New Delhi by vice-president Hamid Ansari on January 14, offers cold comfort.
ASER 2010 — the outcome of over 25,000 volunteers (mainly higher secon-dary and undergraduate students) fanning out across 522 districts of rural India starting last September — asses-sed actual learning outcomes in 13,000 (mainly government) sample village primaries countrywide. Pratham has been conducting this exercise annually to measure actual learning outcomes in rural India since 2005.
Inevitably as in the past six years since Pratham (annual budget: Rs.70 crore) started this valuable annual initiative, ASER 2010 doesn’t offer much cheer. Although the GER (gross enrolment ratio) in primary education has risen from 95 percent in 2009 to 96.5 percent in 2010, the percentage of class V children who cannot read class II texts which was static at 50 percent for the past four years, has actually risen to 53 percent, indicating that very little learning happens in the classrooms of rural primaries mainly run by lack-adaisical state governments.
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“The impact of five years of schooling on the child who entered class I in 2005 is not much different from that on the child who entered class 1 in 2001. If anything, the ability to read seems to have dropped a couple of notches over the five-year span,” says Madhav Chavan, the promoter-chief executive of Pratham.
This is bad news for Indian taxpayers because a massive sum estimated at Rs.240,000 crore, equivalent to 4 percent of the country’s GDP is expended — out of tax revenues — annually by the Central and state governments on education, of which Rs.120,000 crore is allocated for primary education. ASER 2010 quite clearly indicates that the taxpayer is getting precious little for his investment in education if over half the students in class V can’t negotiate class II texts. Moreover ASER 2010 also records that 46 percent of class III students in rural India can’t read class I textbooks, and that maths learning in particular is really poor in rural primaries.
“Obviously there’s cause for concern about the quality of education being dispensed in mainly government rural primaries if the percentage of class III students who cannot read class I texts has remained almost static for several years, and the percentage of class V students who cannot do simple division sums has increased by 10 percent over last year,” says Rukmini Banerji, director of the ASER Centre, Mumbai.
With specific reference to Mahar-ashtra — the country’s most industrial state accounting for 25 percent of the nation’s industrial output — ASER 2010 indicates that 31 percent of rural primaries in Maharashtra have to do without drinking water, 45 percent don’t have toilets, and 55 percent don’t offer separate toilets for girl children.
Against this backdrop, it’s hardly surprising that the percentage of children fleeing to private schools is increasing continuously. The percentage of children aged six-14 enroled in fees-levying private schools in rural India has increased from 21.8 percent in 2009 to 24.3 percent in 2010. This was a mere 16.3 percent nationally in 2005, says ASER 2010.
There’s a moral in the story which government educrats managing Rs.120,000 crore invested annually by taxpayers in primary education, need to heed.
Bharati Thakore (Mumbai)
Embarrassing faux pas
Even as the western Maharrashtra city of Pune (pop. 6 million) is positioning itself as a new technologies hub to attract investment and rival Bangalore and Hyderabad as the IT (information technology) capital of the country, University of Pune (UoP, estb. 1948) which projects itself as the country’s largest and most technologically on-the-ball varsity, has caused the city and itself a major embarrassment.
The eponymous university which hosts 46 academic departments and manages 612 affiliated colleges and 300 recognised institutions with an aggr-egate enrolment of 650,000 students and the largest population of foreign students of any varsity in the country, suffered a major exposure of its engineering exams database on January 17. Consequently the management was forced to block access to its website for the online examination of its first-year engineering (FE) degree programme.
For over 30 minutes, the exam’s database, including model answer sheets, remained open and accessible to all. The technical glitch came to light when the first three model papers of FE — an exam conducted online for 84 affiliated engineering colleges — also became accessible to students writing the examination.
To allay students apprehensions, vice chancellor R.K. Shevgaonkar announced that there was no cause for alarm. “We took printouts of the written answer papers immediately. Therefore we have the examinees’ answer papers written before model answers became acces-sible. Moreover all access to the site was blocked instantly. We are now modifying the exam software to bring in better security features,” he says.
Following the January 17 contretemps, a core committee headed by the dean of the engineering faculty has been entrusted with the task of tightening the online exam process for these papers. “The online exams database is uploaded on the university’s server and a designated authority in each affiliated college is given the password for accessing information from this database. A specific internet protocol code is used for this purpose,” explains S.M. Ahire, UoP’s controller of examinations. But quite obviously these security features proved inadequate. On January 17, when 25,000 UoP engin-eering students logged in to write the FE, it was discovered that the site (http://foe.unipune.ac.in/phpmyadmn) was open and key information relating to college log-ins, question bank, model answer sheets, etc was exposed to all visitors.
Shevgaonkar has an explanation for this embarrassing faux pas. “Perhaps because we changed the software programme and previous vendor, this glitch occurred. Although for a few moments the entire exam database was exposed, we took immediate action by blocking the site,” he explains.
For bemused students who wrote the FE exam which may have to be re-written, the management’s inability to iron out online glitches three years on, has hurt UoP’s reputation for engineering education excellence. “If UoP, for all its boastfulness about hosting the country’s best engineering colleges, can’t integrate technology into the administrative system, I wonder how well its engineering degrees will be valued,” says M. Rishikesh, a second-year engineering student of the city’s JPM Engineering College.
Perhaps the university’s management needs to take time off from educating students to training its staff.
Huned Contractor (Pune)