The progress of school education in India

India’s recent economic growth rates have generated much optimism about its general social and economic development. The story of India’s educational achievements is one of mixed success. On the down side, India has 22 per cent of the world’s population, but 46 per cent of the world’s illiterates, and is home to a high proportion of the world’s out-of-school children and youth. On the positive side, it has made encouraging recent progress in raising schooling participation. While the base of India’s education pyramid may be weak, it has emerged as an important player in the worldwide information technology revolution on the back of substantial (absolute) numbers of well-educated computer-science and other graduates. 

While India does well compared to Bangladesh and Pakistan, it lags substantially behind all the other BRIC countries and Sri Lanka, and is also behind the average for ‘developing countries’. Indeed, it is striking that its overall adult literacy rate is similar to—and female adult literacy rate lower than—that of Sub-Saharan Africa. The comparison with China is of particular interest and it shows India to be at a considerable educational disadvantage: India’s adult literacy in the early 2000s was wholly 30 percentage points below that of China. Even focusing more narrowly on only the youth literacy rates, India’s disadvantage with respect to China is a large 22.5 percentage points. 

The impact, on children’s educational outcomes, of a variety of incentive-based educational interventions for teachers and schools, such as the impact of performance related pay and of performance-related tenure-conferment for teachers, the impact of public–private partnerships of different kinds, such as supply-side (per-student aid) and demand-side (voucher) funded schools. The lack of good incentives for schools and teachers are issues that need to be addressed head-on by scholars and policy-makers.

Trends in inequality in access to and quality of education. Given the rapid spread of private schooling, it is expected that economic inequality in education has risen over time and education policy-makers need to be aware of the extent of this phenomenon.

The influence of political-economy factors in shaping public education policies and processes, so that attempts might be made to bring more rationality into educational decision-making.