On a dirt road off the Latehar-Daltonganj highway, students cheerfully set up their classrooms. Despite an acute teacher shortage, the principal Ganesh Singh has found innovative ways to involve children in the school proceedings.
What stands out in this school is the consistently high student attendance, which is a clear consequence of the engaging lessons and the availability of resources, including clean classrooms, sturdy infrastructure, functional toilets, and a working kitchen.
“Despite constraints, we do our best,” Ganesh confidently asserts, “that is why our children come every day. Tab hi toh sabko seekhne ka mauka milega na? (Only then will everyone get a chance to learn, no?)” Sadly, this government school is an outlier.
Nearby, dark clouds loom over another school, where a mere 40% student attendance tells a sad story. Amid shambolic infrastructure, the single-teacher’s presence is inconsistent, at best. Children sit through the day because they must, not because they want to. Schools like this one are the norm in the under-served rural hinterlands of Jharkhand and Bihar.
Despite strides in enrolment in Indian primary schools, the student retention trend is worrying. Systemic apathy towards vulnerable populations has resulted in a crisis of depleting enrolment. As Figure 1 depicts, the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) dwindles rapidly towards higher classes.
Figure 1: Gross Enrolment Ratio in Jharkhand and Bihar. Source: UDISE+, Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education
A grimmer picture emerges when enrolment is compared to actual attendees. In Jharkhand, observed attendance is a mere 68% for primary and 58% for middle schools. The figures are even lower for Bihar at an appalling 20% and 23%. Through our first-hand observations in Bihar and Jharkhand, we found that several schools, with exemplary enrollment and attendance on paper, were half-empty spaces with no purposeful day-to-day operations.
What are the reasons for this alarming emptiness in schools?
While some of the popularly attributed reasons blame this on families’ lack of investments, we argue that the problems lie with the supply-side. A key one is the shortage of teachers and lack of teaching in government schools. A third of primary schools in Jharkhand are single-teacher schools whereas in Bihar, they amount to 10%. In other schools, the pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) is disruptively high, which increases the burden on the available teachers to do multi-grade teaching.
Our fieldwork tells us that many schoolteachers simply fail to teach daily. Not only do they not use new materials or pedagogies, but they rarely teach. Burgeoning administrative tasks, social biases towards marginalised children, low motivation, and ineffective training create an impasse. Even if a teacher is skilled and motivated, any teaching time they have is consumed with submitting reports, organising midday meals, and managing funds. Not surprisingly, children find nothing of value in schools and stop coming.
This absence of activity persists also because the monitoring system’s monthly visits by officials are often a mere formality. In Bihar, we saw a Block Education Officer (BEO) register listing ‘no issues’ for multiple visits in a month to a particular school. Our visits to the same school revealed a flooded straw-bamboo infrastructure, students sitting on gunny bags, rotten rice stocks for midday meals, and more importantly, a teacher who rarely stepped into class. But no such issues existed, at least on official records.
Even school calendars fail to align with the lived realities of students. Most of them in rural Jharkhand and Bihar are often from Adivasi and Dalit families involved in seasonal migration, agricultural harvests, and collecting forest produce for sustenance. Unsurprisingly, attendance drops during these months of seasonal livelihood – which is misinterpreted by many as a disinterest towards education.
The consistently low attendance in schools triggers a ‘learning crisis’ that pushes students to disenroll. To improve learning outcomes, the central government launched the NIPUN Bharat Mission in 2021. This has resulted in large-scale distribution of teaching resources and pedagogical training. Despite inefficiencies in implementation, these efforts have put the spotlight on low learning. Unfortunately, the beam fails to illuminate low attendance and depleting enrolment.
Current attempts in Jharkhand and Bihar are discrete one-off programmes that focus on coercing children to go to school or take punitive actions. While these efforts might produce temporary spikes in attendance and enrollment, we need systemic changes to solve this issue. So, what will it take?
Although the schooling system is not ideal, accessibility, infrastructure, teacher and student attendance have improved since the 1990s. But the job is not even half-done.
Also read: Why There is an Urgent Need to Make Early Childhood Care and Education a Right of All Children
A political will to meet the Right to Education (RTE) norms on PTR is a starting point. With manageable classrooms and hopefully more time to teach, teachers might find their motivation with further help from better professional development. When children see there is something worth going to school for, they would want to be in school.
However, in what circumstances can the role of the stakeholders improve? Teachers and parents are two crucial pieces of the puzzle and need to live up to their roles. A teacher’s will to teach needs to be stimulated to positively affect student attendance. This could be coded into the hiring process, connected to the promotion system, or provided through continuous teacher development.
Empowerment of parents through an active orientation of the School Management Committees (SMC) is equally vital. Increasing representation of parents from marginalised backgrounds and transparent communication about attendance data will help. The RTE Act gives an agency to parents to play a role in the management and monitoring of the school, including keeping a watchful eye on the development funds. If parents use this agency, teaching and attendance will surely improve.
Additionally, school calendars need to be sensitive to contextual social patterns. A decentralised academic calendar will take students along, instead of pushing them out of school.
And what about the inertia that plagues the administration? Systemic inefficiency is increased by the social distance between those who run the education system and those who are supposed to benefit from it. The educational bureaucracy is in urgent need of sensitivity towards Adivasi, Dalit and OBC students — who are often the ones at the highest risk of dropping out. Without an anti-caste stance and belief in social justice, we would be unable to provide quality education to our masses. While appreciating and advocating for a continued focus on improving learning outcomes, we call for urgent recognition of low attendance and depleting enrollment. If the system can be galvanised to attempt solving the learning crisis, the same can be done for attendance and enrolment. For schooling to achieve the goals it envisions, these must be simultaneous.
Paran Amitava is an independent researcher studying the schooling system in Jharkhand. Abhinav Ghosh is a PhD candidate at Harvard University.