India’s primary education
delivery system has indeed transformed from its Gurukul to Macaulay’s education system in 20th century and now
Free and Compulsory education system. No one can deny that despite lots of
challenges, India has achieved huge milestones in education sector because of
its consistent efforts in last many decades by current and successive
governments. There is significant access in schooling, increase in enrolments
and development of infrastructure in education sector in different part of
India.
In existing education service
delivery system, there are 3 sources to provide primary education; Government
established schools, Government aided schools (run by private institutions or
societies) and Private schools. The primary responsibility to provide
elementary education to children in country is lies with Government of India with
support of their State counterparts. In current scenario Government schools are
still largest source to access primary education while numbers of private
schools are increasing too.
Some interesting trend emerges
from the Annual Status Report 2016 (ASER). Enrolment of students has increased
in comparison to its last year tally, the learning ability to students have
increased too. The infrastructure has improved in Govt. schools, teacher pupils’
ratio has reached to the desired level, the ratio of gender parity has
improved, most of schools are having sanitation facilities etc.
But still, it’s not
enough to reach out to the goal for providing Free and Compulsory education to
each and every child in the country. In spite
of the massive expansion of educational facilities and efforts made for
qualitative improvement of elementary education, the problems of access,
participation and quality in respect of elementary education continued to
persist. This, together with a variety of new challenges and social needs made
it imperative to evolve a new design for education.
In my opinion, only few modifications in existing policy would not make any difference
until there is paradigm shift in
whole education approach. There is no any coherence between
existing educational framework and potential employment sectors which is resulting
into massive skill initiatives by Govt. After main stream
education program, large chunk of youth are going for additional vocational
skilling programs to acquire new skill sets to get employment. If, it would
have been synced with their main stream education programs certainly they would
have reduced time and effort to get employment and even Govt. might have
reduced its exchequer on skill projects too.
Indian Inc may play a very crucial role
by engaging with various stakeholders and may deliberate upon formulating a new
education delivery mechanism. In new system, corporate may invest their
earmarked CSR budget to strengthen, school infrastructure, supply teaching
learning materials, capacity building of teachers, designing integrated
curriculum and course content, use of technology in monitoring, assessment of
schools and most important mobilization of students to improve enrollment and attendance. To make
govt. education system lucrative to its customer, corporate may add value by
bringing lot of innovative practices from their business experiences.
So my take on this subject, there
is need of developing synergy between education policies, course content,
service delivery with taking India’s growth (next 25-30 years) in the
consideration, especially being attentive to absorb its demographic dividends. For any strong nation their foundation
(children) to be strong as well and this could be achieved only by providing
quality education to the children and linking education with nation growth
plan. Indian Inc has to think beyond conventional education projects to
transformative education projects in various streams.
