Patna: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen on Tuesday lauded the progress made in Bihar's elementary education in the last few years but stressed the need to do much more in this field.
Releasing a report "Elementary Education in Bihar: Progress and Challenges", Sen said: "There are certainly many signs of change. The number of schools has jumped forward, the shortfall of teachers has come down sharply, attendance of students is definitely up and the enrolment ratio has reached the comfortable figure of 98 percent."
According to the report, the availability of schools has now been doubled as number of schools per one lakh population has increased from 60.2 in 2005-06 to 107.3 in 2008-09.
The overall enrolment ratio in elementary education is found to be extremely high, about 98.1 percent for all children of 6-14 years. Nearly 95 percent of the students are enrolled in government schools, the backbone of the elementary schooling system in the state.
Sen pointed that yet it is also a report on how much more needs to be done.
"There are still a substantial incidences of teacher absenteeism, the number of teachers, especially of well educated teachers, is still much below anything that can be called satisfactory, the school inspection system remains severely incomplete and the participatory arrangement of Vidyalaya Shiksha Samiti (school education council) has become rather dysfunctional," he said.
The report added that there has been an advancement in teachers' recruitment in Bihar in recent years, bringing their strength to about 4.33 lakh. However, the total required is at least 7.28 lakh, implying a shortfall of about 40.5 percent.
The average attendance in a day is 61.6 percent of enrolment as per the school level data and 85.0 percent as per the household survey. Thus the average rate is at about 70-75 percent - an improvement over the past, but this needs to be improved further, the report said.
"There are other gaps and deficiencies to which this report draws attention, including the wide prevalence of reliance of primary school students on private tution, outside the school, a fairly strong indictment of the quality and reach of the education that the schools provide," Sen said.
However, he said that no one expected that the long-standing problems of educational neglect in Bihar would disappear instantly. "There are some real sparks of hope there, to which we also draw attention and which deserve appreciation," he said.
The 88-page report has been jointly prepared by Patna-based, Centre for Economic Policy and Public Finance (CEPPF), the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI), and the Pratichi (India) Trust.
The study was conducted in five districts of Bihar - Bhojpur, Bhagalpur, Gopalganj, Madhubani and Katihar. In each district, six villages were chosen for collecting data on village characteristics, schools (primary and upper primary) and household educational practices. In all, the study is based on data in 30 villages, 31 schools and 900 households.
Among all the Indian states, it is Bihar where the literacy rate is the lowest. The 2011 census has recorded the literacy rate in Bihar to be only 63.8 percent, compared to 74.0 percent for the entire country. IANS
Releasing a report "Elementary Education in Bihar: Progress and Challenges", Sen said: "There are certainly many signs of change. The number of schools has jumped forward, the shortfall of teachers has come down sharply, attendance of students is definitely up and the enrolment ratio has reached the comfortable figure of 98 percent."
According to the report, the availability of schools has now been doubled as number of schools per one lakh population has increased from 60.2 in 2005-06 to 107.3 in 2008-09.
The overall enrolment ratio in elementary education is found to be extremely high, about 98.1 percent for all children of 6-14 years. Nearly 95 percent of the students are enrolled in government schools, the backbone of the elementary schooling system in the state.
Sen pointed that yet it is also a report on how much more needs to be done.
"There are still a substantial incidences of teacher absenteeism, the number of teachers, especially of well educated teachers, is still much below anything that can be called satisfactory, the school inspection system remains severely incomplete and the participatory arrangement of Vidyalaya Shiksha Samiti (school education council) has become rather dysfunctional," he said.
The report added that there has been an advancement in teachers' recruitment in Bihar in recent years, bringing their strength to about 4.33 lakh. However, the total required is at least 7.28 lakh, implying a shortfall of about 40.5 percent.
The average attendance in a day is 61.6 percent of enrolment as per the school level data and 85.0 percent as per the household survey. Thus the average rate is at about 70-75 percent - an improvement over the past, but this needs to be improved further, the report said.
"There are other gaps and deficiencies to which this report draws attention, including the wide prevalence of reliance of primary school students on private tution, outside the school, a fairly strong indictment of the quality and reach of the education that the schools provide," Sen said.
However, he said that no one expected that the long-standing problems of educational neglect in Bihar would disappear instantly. "There are some real sparks of hope there, to which we also draw attention and which deserve appreciation," he said.
The 88-page report has been jointly prepared by Patna-based, Centre for Economic Policy and Public Finance (CEPPF), the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI), and the Pratichi (India) Trust.
The study was conducted in five districts of Bihar - Bhojpur, Bhagalpur, Gopalganj, Madhubani and Katihar. In each district, six villages were chosen for collecting data on village characteristics, schools (primary and upper primary) and household educational practices. In all, the study is based on data in 30 villages, 31 schools and 900 households.
Among all the Indian states, it is Bihar where the literacy rate is the lowest. The 2011 census has recorded the literacy rate in Bihar to be only 63.8 percent, compared to 74.0 percent for the entire country. IANS
