A lesson learnt

Mr Chautala's sentence, ASER show focus on teaching needed

The sentencing of former Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala, his son Ajay Chautala, and of three officials who served in the Haryana government under him in the early part of the last decade, to 10 years in jail is a landmark step. Mr Chautala has appealed the sentence, which is surprisingly stringent for a white-collar crime. But it is a reminder that India’s political and bureaucratic leaders cannot expect impunity, and that public and judicial tolerance for corruption, cronyism and patronage is at an all-time low. It is particularly instructive that Mr Chautala was sentenced to jail for what many in positions of power in this country would traditionally have thought of as a minor infringement of the rules — bypassing procedure to hand-pick junior basic training (JBT) teachers for state schools. The successful JBT teachers, it has been alleged, paid bribes or were associates of Mr Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal party.

The important point is that this is far from a victimless crime. It is not empty patronage, in which meaningless posts are filled with political appointees. It has real and worrisome effects on the standards of education in India, especially at a time when more and more funding is being poured into the sector in a desperate race against demographics to upgrade India’s human capital. The recently released Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), which surveys India’s schools in association with the NGO Pratham, has shown that educational standards in rural Haryana have actually shown a decline in consecutive years. The problem continues to be that teachers are unaccountable and frequently untrained — precisely the sort of problem bred by the misuse of power of the sort that Mr Chautala allegedly committed. The impact is stark: ASER surveyed 22,000 students in 575 Haryana villages and found that over 40 per cent of Class-V students were not able to read from textbooks of even Class II — up from 33.5 per cent in 2010. There continues to be a deficit of schoolteachers in Haryana – the state is short by about 26,000 – and these posts cannot be filled through patronage and bribery.

Indeed, across India, government schools have been forced into expansion without the implementation of important accountability procedures that judge outcomes, and students are paying for this. Around 40 per cent are forced to supplement their classes with tuitions. The proportion in private schools has increased by 10 per cent in 10 years. Even states with a reputation for being well governed are showing very stark declines. In Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, for example, 63 per cent of Class-V children were able to solve simple two-digit subtraction problems, according to that year’s ASER report. That’s shown a steady decline to 49.1 per cent in 2012. It is increasingly clear that India’s education policy needs to alter focus and start considering outcomes instead of just inputs.