Professor Ankur Sarin
Apart from a few notable exceptions, the state’s commitment to education has always been high on rhetoric and low on practice. Budgetary announcements are typically expected to do little to change that perception. Attention grabbing pronouncements on investments in technology and skills that have limited impact can be expected. However, if used imaginatively, budgets can serve as tools for not only changing resource allocations, but also institutional and governance structures.
Steps to address the crisis in schooling needs to start from the most important person in the institutional set-up — the government school-teacher. While the problem of quality of teachers is deep, and without any quick fixes, a first step would be to rationalise and fill vacancies that are at 17 percent on average across states, even after including part-time teachers.
Second would be to at least recognise the thousands of “positive deviants”, the hard working teachers that defy odds to teach the most marginalized children. While doing so, it would also be important to recognise the expertise in the private sector that is willing to commit itself to the task without primarily being driven by commercial motivations.
A “dream budget” would build on these and allocate funds to recognise such teachers and discover institutional mechanisms to involve them in rebuilding the government school system along with private and state actors. The example of Karnataka’s Nalli Kalli is an example of both the potential and mechanism for doing so.
The central government could incentivise such institutional experiments at the state level with specially allocated funds.
Another simple starting point would be to directly allocate a small fund (example Rs 1000) to each and every government school teacher with complete discretion on how to use these funds. Teachers could use these funds to buy books of their choice.
They could use it to attend teacher training workshops. The only provision that should accompany such funding is that teachers share how these funds have been used in a publicly visible board in the school.
Assuming 10 million teachers in elementary education, the expenditure would be around 2 per cent of the budget allotted for school education in last year’s budget.
Such a scheme could serve as an impetus to infuse experimentation and innovation among teachers. It would also serve a way for the government to encourage the participation of committed actors in the education space without the accompanying worries of corruption that usually accompany decisions tied in with higher expenditure like procurement of books at the state level.
More importantly, it would be an opportunity to instill confidence in the people most critical to rebuild the public school system.
Ankur Sarin is a Professor of Public Systems Group (PSG) at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
First Published in 'The Indian Express'.
