User:Sammwise39%/Education in India

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Education System

Up until 1976, under the Indian constitution, school education was a state subject; states possessed full jurisdiction over making and implementing education policies. After the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution of India was passed in 1976, education fell under the concurrent list. This granted power to the central government to recommend policies and programmes, even if state governments continued to wield extensive autonomy in implementing these programmes. In a country as large as India, now with 28 states and eight union territories, this has created vast differences between states in terms of their policies, plans, programmes and initiatives relating to school education.

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Demand for private schools has been growing over the years. While a consensus over what is the most significant driver of this growth in private schooling has not yet emerged, some authors have attributed this to a higher demand for English-medium education, a dissatisfaction with the quality of public schools, greater affordability of private schools, and non-availability of preferred field of study in government schools. After the adoption of the Right to Education (RTE) Act 2009, private schools were required to be 'government-recognised'. A private school would be eligible for government recognition when it met certain conditions.

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Educational Stages

Primary Education

The primary education in India is divided into two parts, namely Lower Primary (Class I-V) and Upper Primary (Middle school, Class VI-VIII). The Indian government lays emphasis on primary education (Class I-VIII) also referred to as elementary education, to children aged 6 to 14 years old. Because education laws are given by the states, duration of primary school visit alters between the Indian states. The Indian government has also banned child labour in order to ensure that the children do not enter unsafe working conditions. However, both free education and the ban on child labour are difficult to enforce due to economic disparity and social conditions. 80% of all recognised schools at the elementary stage are government run or supported, making it the largest provider of education in the country. Figures released by the Indian government in 2011 show that there were 5,816,673 elementary school teachers in India. As of March 2012 there were 2,127,000 secondary school teachers in India. Education has also been made free for children for 6 to 14 years of age or up to class VIII under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009. While school enrollment rates have increased in the post-liberalisation era, many children leave school with sparse literacy and numeracy skills. ASER reported in 2019 that only 50% of fifth standard students in rural India can read a Standard II-level text, and only 29% of them can do basic division.

However, due to a shortage of resources and lack of political will, this system suffers from massive gaps including high pupil to teacher ratios, shortage of infrastructure and poor levels of teacher training. Some scholars have have used the concept of "visibility" to explain why successive governments have underprioritised investments directed at raising the quality of teaching and education in India relative to investments in building more schools. Building schools is more "visible" to the voting public and easily attributable to the government; training teachers to teach better and raising the quality of education is a more uncertain venture, the success of which is determined by factors outside the control of any one government. This incentivises governments to focus their resources on "visible" areas of intervention.

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This primary education scheme has also shown a high gross enrolment ratio of 93–95% for the last three years in some states. Significant improvement in staffing and enrolment of girls has also been made as a part of this scheme. The scheme for universalisation of Education for All is the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan which is one of the largest education initiatives in the world. While school enrolment rates have increased, the quality of education received by students remains low. The literature suggests that one of the biggest reasons for quality deficiencies in primary and secondary education is teacher absence and negligence. In one popular study, the researchers made unannounced visits to 3700 schools in 20 major Indian states, where they found that, on average, 25% of government primary school teachers absent every day. In another study, although it was found that three-quarters of the teachers were in attendance in the government primary schools that were inspected, only half of them were found teaching.