Although the Central and especially state governments, seem to believe that the major problem in primary-secondary education is getting children into school (gross enrolment ratio or GER), the real challenge in 21st century allegedly shining India — which hosts the world’s largest population of illiterates — is to combine high GER with delivery of meaningful, high-quality class I-XII education in the country’s estimated 4.5 million instructional rooms. And this is a challenge that state governments who run the great majority of the 1.25 million government primary and 44,000 secondary schools haven’t been able to address in the past six decades. As the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2010 produced diligently by the admirable Mumbai-based NGO Pratham highlights every year, learning outcomes in government primaries which dominate rural India are deplorable. Nor are learning outcomes of state government and municipal urban schools significantly better.
Therefore the onus of really — instead of ritually — educating the children of India has devolved upon the country’s growing community of private sector edupreneurs, may their tribe increase. But they need to scale up operations to cater to the huge and ballooning demand for affordable K-12 education, an undertaking which requires considerable intellectual inputs and management expertise.
And perhaps the country’s best exponent of this capability is the Delhi-based Delhi Public Schools Society (estb.1937) which has promoted the nationwide DPS chain of day schools boasting an aggregate enrolment of 275,000 children in 140 K-12 institutions countrywide. To scale up operations, the society has adopted the franchise model, of which educationists tend to be wary, fearing quality and reputation dilution. But by employing a ‘simultaneously loose-tight’ style of management, the DPS Society has been able to maintain high academic and infrastructure standards across its 140 schools, as testified by the high ratings and rankings DPS institutions receive in the annual EducationWorld ratings and ranking of India’s most respected day schools. How committed members of the DPS Society — dominated by retired Central government officials — have developed and nurtured DPS into a nationally respected brand synonymous with education excellence, is detailed in our cover story.
The travails of 21st century India’s education system are not confined to the K-12 segment. Higher education is a mirror image of the primary-secondary sector characterised by a few islands of excellence within the country’s 509 universities and 31,000 colleges. As evidenced by the vast number of unemployable graduates churned out by the country’s degree factories, the great majority of India’s tertiary education institutions are obsolete and in urgent need of resuscitation and repair. A remedial proposal which has been repeatedly advanced is an apex-level supra regulator of all higher education institutions countrywide. The Union HRD ministry’s Higher Education and Research Bill, 2010 proposes establishment of a National Commission of Higher Education and Research (NCHER) to subsume all other regulatory organisations such as UGC, AICTE, NCTE among others. Is this a good idea? Assistant editor Summiya Yasmeen examines this legislation of momentous import.
