The promising news is that much has improved. Appearently, school infrastructure has improved tremendously since the first PROBE survey in 1996-97. Disparities in enrollment have reduced, and mid-day meals now supplement education with nutrition. Most of all, school enrollment has improved to the point where “the goal of universal school participation is within reach.”

The bad news is that just as much has not improved. While the framework conditions might have improved, schools continue to fail in the actual delivery of education. Indeed,  “in rural north India, on an average day, there is no teaching activity in about half of the primary schools.” And where their is teaching, it is of an extremely poor quality.

And the ugly truth seems to be that there are no quick fixes – and few seem to care. Contract teacher and local empowerment have largely failed. But the most damming evidence is against the solution proposed by liberal economists of a wholesale privatization of education:

The proliferation of private schools in both urban and rural areas often creates an impression that this is the solution. A closer look at the evidence, however, does not support these expectations. The quality of private schools varies a great deal, and the ’cheaper’ ones (those that are accessible to poor families) are not very different from government schools. Their success in attracting children is not always a reflection of better teaching standards; some of them also take advantage of the ignorance of parents, for example, with misleading claims of being “English medium.” Further, a privatised schooling system is inherently inequitable, as schooling opportunities depend on one’s ability to pay. It also puts girls at a disadvantage: boys accounted for 74 per cent of all children enrolled in private schools in the 2006 survey (compared with 51 per cent of children enrolled in government schools). Private schooling therefore defeats one of the main purposes of ’universal elementary education’ – breaking the old barriers of class, caste, and gender in Indian society.

The evidence of the PROBE team directly contradicts other studies that suggest private schools to be better than government ones (evidence for private schools here, against here). It also seems to bear out the fear of most social scientists that private schools undermine social inequity. Therefore, it is likely to only energize the debate on which system is better. But PROBE provides a final argument for improving government schools that has seldom been considered before.

Despite the recent mushrooming of private schools, about 80 per cent of school-going children were enrolled in government schools in 2006 – the same as in 1996. This situation is likely to continue in the foreseeable future, which makes it imperative to do something about classroom activity levels in government schools, instead of giving up on them.

Clearly, private education has a role to play in educating India’s masses. But the last 10 years show that given the right pressures on government education can improve. So rather than give up on 80% of our schools, this report should be treated as a call to action to achieve the remaining change that is still necessary.

For an overview of recent discussions on this debate and further references, see a prior post Rebuttal: Education and the State. For a more comprehensive assessment, see the Annual Status of Education  Report (ASER).

Note: The PROBE report itself seems not to be freely available – curious given its intended purpose and title. Anyone know if it is available online?

The WSJ goes into excruciating details of how India’s license Raj is stiffling education and education providers.

“There is a quiet crisis in higher education in India that runs deep,” said Sam Pitroda, chairman of commission, in a report. “The system as a whole is overregulated.”

India’s national and state governments are pouring billions of dollars into expanding higher education. The Indian government, which funds about a third of India’s public higher-education costs (states pay the rest), plans a ninefold increase in spending to $17 billion over the next five years, according to a plan unveiled in 2007.

But reducing the bureaucratic burden on the sector won’t be easy. Any change in the powers of the All India Council for Technical Education requires a vote of Parliament, whose members can derive influence by pressuring educational institutions to admit children of supporters, several officials of colleges and college boards say.

“Education is a vote-getting patronage item,” says Ajit Rangnekar, deputy dean of the Indian Business School. That school, launched in 2001 with the support of India’s business elite, isn’t under the purview of the Council for Technical Education.

So far so good – that politicians and beauracrats use their position for power is hardly surprising. So yes, overregulation is a problem. And if lower regulation helped the boom in telecommunications, it is natural to expect it will also help education. But how far is enough?

Atanu goes too far in concluding that if too much government is bad then no government whatsoever must be the only way forward. The idea, that has been espoused often by many free-market economists, is that unbridled privatization of education will save us all.

To a certain extent, this assertion comes down to ideology – privatization has been en vogue. Yet, with the pendulum swinging the other way in America and elsewhere amid calls for greater regulation of everything one must pause to at least review if the alternative is so great.

Second, the suggestion that privatization is in itself a solution is too simplistic. India’s colleges suffer from red tape. However, they also suffer from lack of resources, a general paucity of trained teachers, a social framework that no longer values teachers (as it did gurus), and extreanous calls upon the attentions of teachers. The idea that the withdrawal of the government will solve all of these problems is disingenous. As Martin Carnoy had commented with regard to education vouchers:

I would like to believe, with Professor West, in a panacea that could make everyone learn more without investing enormous time and effort in improving children’s nutrition, home lives, and the way all schools deliver knowledge. Our task as educators and social reformers would be that much simpler. Unfortunately, vouchers tend to divert attention from the overall complexity of the learning problem rather than providing a real solution.

Altbach and Jayaram provide a more balanced perspective in the Hindu. Theirs is a perspective on the specific initiative (that the WSJ mentions) - the creation of world class universities. The article pokes quite a few holes into the government’s strategy. Yet, it concludes

The challenges facing the creation of world-class universities are daunting. Indeed, if India is to succeed as a great technological power with a knowledge-based economy, world-class universities are required. The first step, however, is to examine the problems and create realistic solutions. Spending large sums scattershot will not work. Nor will copying the American academic model succeed.

This is a more realistic view. But it also highlights why privatization in education will not be so easy. In India, universities have not merely been vehicles for enhancing competitiveness of a “knowledge economy.” They have had at least as important a role to play in social cohesion by providing a secular curriculum and the appearence of equal access. If we are to change that role, it cannot be done without a debate on the pros and cons.

Finally, there is one more argument against complete privatization. By all means, the government is responsible for the failure of higher education. But there are two responses to that failure – ask the government to withdraw, or hold it accountable to its citizens. I much prefer the latter. Certainly, it may not be the easier of the two, but it is how democracies should work.

There is great virtue in the American way, which expects CEOs to perform on a quarterly basis, presidents and Congresses to reinvent politics in 100 days, generals to wipe out opponents in 100 hours without taking significant casualties, doctors to save life and limb every time, search engines to yield a million results in less than a second, and so on. There is also great virtue in the belief that what is bad can be made good, and that what is good can be made great, and that what is fractionally less than great is downright awful.

But these virtues can spawn vices. One is impatience. Another is a culture of chronic complaint. A third is the belief that every problem has a solution, that trial is possible without error, that risks must always be zero, that every inconvenience is an outrage, every setback a disaster and every mishap a plausible basis for a lawsuit.

It is often said that the Bush administration’s effort to bring democracy to the Middle East wasn’t so much a case of American idealism as it was of hubris. That may yet prove true. But is it any less hubristic to think the enterprise was ever going to be brought off without blundering time and again? It’s a thought that ought to weigh especially heavily on Mr. Obama, dream candidate of America’s great expectations.

What is perhaps most pertinent here is that last paragraph, which provides a compelling case for at least trying. It, therefore, contradicts another WSJ oped titled Democracy Has Been Demoted. Talking of the Burmese protests in October, Daniel Henninger (October 4, 2007) argued then that the principle of spreading democracy itself was out of favor:

The damage has been done. The Burmese or the voters this week in Ukraine’s fitful democracy or Russia’s Garry Kasparov–who all want what Mr. Bush described in that doctrine–should understand how far down in importance their goal has fallen in the affairs of men.

The point is this. It is easy to criticize the war for the misery it has brought on everyone. Yet, had Rumsfeld succeeded in establishing a stable State quickly he would have been heralded as a savior, not treated like a pariah. Is it right to reject the war or its principles simply because hindsight is 20-20?

The purpose, of course, is not to analyze Iraq ad neauseum. But what Iraq seems to suggest and what these two articles show is that there is a fine line between promoting democracy – and imposing it. The failure of the latter effort should not be turned into a rejection of the former.

One of the main arguments of those propogating economic growth has been that it reduces poverty. China is a frequently cited example. Yet, as Bardhan shows, economic growth may have less to do with poverty reduction in China than previously imagined, and conversely, that poverty declined less rapidly in India during the period of economic growth:

Estimates made at the World Bank suggest that two-thirds of the total decline in the numbers of poor people – below the admittedly crude poverty line of $1 a day per capita – in China between 1981 and 2004 already happened by the mid-1980s, before the big strides in foreign trade and investment in China during the 1990s and later. Much of the extreme poverty was concentrated in rural areas, and its large decline in the first half of the 1980s is perhaps mainly a result of the spurt in agricultural growth following de-collectivization, egalitarian land reform and readjustment of farm procurement prices – mostly internal factors that had little to do with global integration.

In India the latest survey data suggest that the rate of decline in poverty somewhat slowed for 1993-2005, the period of intensive opening of the economy, compared to the 1970s and 1980s, and that some child-health indicators, already dismal, have hardly improved in recent years. For example, the percentage of underweight children in India is much larger than in sub-Saharan Africa and has not changed much in the last decade or so. The growth in the agricultural sector, where much of the poverty is concentrated, has declined somewhat in the last decade, largely on account of the decline of public investment in areas like irrigation, which has little to do with globalization.

This contradicts what is now taken as an article of faith within the economic liberalization community. However, the article does not give much to the anti-globalization camp either, for it points out that the inequality cannot be directly ascribed to liberalization or globalization.

But it is not always clear that globalization is the main force responsible for increased inequality. In fact, expansion of labor-intensive industrialization, as has happened in China as the economy opened up, may have helped large numbers of workers. Also, the usual process of economic development involves a major restructuring of the economy, with people moving from agriculture, a sector with low inequality, to other sectors. It is also the case that inequality increased more rapidly in the interior provinces in China than in the more globally exposed coastal provinces. In any case it is often statistically difficult to disentangle the effects of globalization from those of the ongoing forces of skill-biased technical progress, as with computers; structural and demographic changes; and macroeconomic policies.

This may seem obvious, but is often forgotten. What causes inequality is not globalization. And what will reduce it or save people from poverty is not economic growth. Rather, it is what internal policies are taken to manage either – or both.

Not surprisingly, what they tell you about China’s remarkable economic development is true. The infrastructure is excellent, the skyscrapers plenty, and the shopping extravagant. Shanghai’s Pudong airport, while hardly world-class, is good, and the maglev train exceptional in avoiding the gridlock above. Through its economic success and achievement, China has, in a sense, thrown a gauntlet at “the west”, and largely done so from a position of self-confidence. For the west, there is a lesson here in how not to underestimate, or prevent the rise of the “third world”.

That success story, however, is not what should interest India. Rather, for India and other developing countries, it is China’s social achievements that should be notable. Four, in particular, struck me.

First, while almost nobody on the street spoke english, absolutely everyone was educated and literate. It is evident that China achieved a very high level of primary education decades before it achieved economic success. Second, there is a curious lack of extreme poverty. While there is, no doubt, poverty in the villages, at least in the cities it is not overwhelming – the begger on the street is the exception, rather than the rule; even in small villages (that my mother visited as a sociologist) schools were well equipped and children healthy and well fed. Third, and perhaps related, China provides a feeling of safety lacking from most developing countries. Even at night, I felt safe traveling alone around the city, as appearently did many single women. Even taxi drivers, much maligned throughout the world, were friendly and unaggressive – a pleasant change from Delhi. And finally, I noted a remarkable level of gender equality on the street. Admittedly bias does exist (e.g. the retirement age is lower for women than for men), yet, it does not exhibit itself very often. Women do many of the same jobs and do not seem to be subjected to the degrading stares they often complain of in India.

Despite its economic achievements, I am not starry eyed about China’s growth simply because it has come at a great cost to a great many people – one can barely start to imagine how many houses were razed at the altar of Shanghai’s Pudong skyline. India may yet build that skyline and embrace special economic zones – or it may reject both forms of economic organization. But it will be a choice of the people, not one forced down its throat by the governing elite – even an educated and benevolent one.

But it is in its cultural and social outlook that China beats India hands down, and where one finds the real success of the former and the failure of the later. China allows its people social freedoms they are denied in India, by creating a secure and safe environment. And it has succeeded in providing much of what a state is expected to provide – basic education, health, and a minimum standard of living.

It is fashionable to compare China and India on economic grounds, and talk of Chindia. To do so, however, is to take a limited view both of China’s achievements and failures, and India’s needs. Indeed, that is a decidedely western perspective that looks at economic issues as paramount. The real lessons for India are not how China achieved its economic growth. Rather, it is to establish what the role of the state is to be in social and national construction. China presents a counterpoint to those that reject a role for the state in social and national construction. And it shows how a leviathan can provide a level of governance that ensures people have what they need.