Skip to main content

Oxfam on WB project: ICT 'ineffective', privatised learning to worsen gender divide

 
A top multinational NGO, with presence in several developed and developing countries, has taken strong exception to the World Bank part-funding Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States (STARS) project in six Indian states – Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha – for its emphasis on information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled approaches for teacher development, student assessment and digital platform for early childhood education. 
The project’s total worth is 3.346 billion USD, or just over a quarter of a trillion INR, of which 500 million USD is financed by a loan from the World Bank. About 85% of the project amount would be funded by the Government of India and the six state governments, where is it proposed to be implemented. Apart from emphasis on ICT, the project project seeks to promote partnership with private sector as a tool to reform education, including the expansion of government funding for private provision of schooling.
While recognising that the use of technology “offers scope for strengthening system capacity”, an Oxfam India policy brief quotes Government of India data to says that 35.6% of the country’s elementary schools lacked electricity connection, only 36.8% secondary schools had a functional computer, 85% of rural households lacked access to internet, and 45% of rural India lacked TV penetration.
Noting that the emphasis on online and distance education has come about amidst Covid-19 crisis, the report says, any use of ICT at this juncture would be “unrealistic”, “insignificant” and “ineffective”, especially for “lesson transaction”, adding, instead, there is a need to prioritize “offline modes (such as print materials) without compromising on physical distancing requirements.”
Oxfam India is a member of an international confederation of 20 organizations, all of them named cafter Oxfam. It claims to be a rights-based organizations, “which fights poverty and injustice by linking grassroots interventions to local, national, and global policy developments.” The report has been written by Anjela Taneja of Oxfam India with the support of several experts, including Prachi Srivastava (University of Western Ontario, Canada), Martin Haus (Education Policy Institute of Bihar), Katie Malouf Bous (Oxfam International), Geetha B Nambissan (Jawaharlal Nehu University), and Archana Mehendale (Tata Institute of Social Sciences).
Claiming that the emphasis on privatising education would exacerbate inequalities, the report cites the World Bank’s “Living Standards Measurement Study in Uttar Pradesh” to show that the gender gap in enrolment in private schools has increased, even when the government schools are closing down.
Insisting that “girls are less likely than boys to be enrolled in private schools”, the study says, “Private schools, by definition, enrol children from families that can afford to pay. Sending a child to a private school in India is approximately nine times as much as the cost of a government school, including all indirect costs associated with schooling, such as buying books, and transport.”
Warning that involving private players would mean STARS project risking “significant diversion of Indian taxpayers’ funds to an array of private actors”, with its impact across India, thus changing “the framing for the private sector’s engagement with education”, the report regrets, this is proposed to be done under the pretext of “private schools’ ‘better’ performance.”
The report believes, reliance on the private sector for delivering education would fundamentally alter “the character of an education system – from a universal good to which everyone has free access by right to a private good which parents must buy.” It adds, “The project appears to be grounded in the assumption that declining enrolment in government schools is principally due to migration to schools run by non-state providers and that government aided schools’ decline is the result of regulatory issues.”
According to the report, similar large scale experiments in other countries, such as the Partnership School for Liberia (PSL) and the Public Private Partnership administered by the Punjab Education Foundation in Pakistan, found that the private schools “enrolled students largely pulled from existing schools.”
 It adds, “Only 1.3% of enrolled students had actually been out of school prior to the commencement of the programme... The Liberia School Pilot was found to have failed to significantly improve learning outcomes, increased dropouts and failed to reduce sexual abuse of students.”
Similarly, in India, the Rajasthan Education Initiative’s review admits that such an approach “failed against many of the stated objectives”, while in Mumbai, the School Excellence Programme implemented by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation “was shut down as learning outcomes failed to improve, indicating the volatility of such approaches and the need for evaluation of such partnerships which involve spending public money on private providers.”
The report further says that the project fails to spell out any clear pro-equity measures” to address “intergenerational, social and economic barriers to the education of Dalits, Adivasis, religious minorities; the specific challenges faced by girls in the Indian context... It does not address discrimination or correct educational inequalities between the rich and the poor in these states.”
It underlines, the fails to prioritize on universal, free secondary completion; address dropout and child labour (particularly of girls); staff and adequately resource schools and teacher training institutes; mainstream mother tongue based multi-lingual education; strengthen social accountability and grievance redress mechanisms thus strengthening citizen voice; and address the needs of migrant families.
The states chosen for the project
Also taking exception to the choice of states, divided them into “high and low achievers” (it calls them Lighthouse and Learning states), the report says, all the six are “largely” middle of the road performing states. “Irrespective of whether one examines the extent of Right to Education (RTE) compliance of schools in a given state or their Performance Grading Index (PGI) performance, the states selected are not the ones most in need of financial and technical support.”
It further says, while the project flags five of six states have designated Schedule V areas, “It is not clear how the project’s governance would take into consideration and protect the existing legal rights of the indigenous populations in these locations. No specific provisions for engagement with the Gram Sabha or differentiation in the processes of planning in Schedule areas which would have been expected according to the provisions of the Panchayat (Extension to Schedule Areas) Act, 1996.”
The report takes exception to the project supporting the administration of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in India, the report suggests, it lacks “addressing concomitant factors responsible for poor learning such as reliance on non-mother tongue based instruction, addressing the discriminatory hidden classroom curriculum (including caste-based discrimination and teachers holding low expectations from children from marginalized communities), absence of home support from neo-literate parents, classroom hunger and other factors.”

Comments

TRENDING

World Hijab Day? Ex-Muslim women observe Feb 1 as No Hijab Day, insist: 'Put it on a Man'

I didn't know that there could ever be a thing as World Hijab Day until I received an email alert from Maryam Namazie of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB), stating that several ex-Muslim women's groups had observed the same day—February 1—as No Hijab Day! According to Namazie, the day "was created on February 1 as a direct response to World Hijab Day" to "illuminate the coercive and oppressive realities of the hijab as a pillar of sex apartheid and a war on women."

Google powered AI refuses to correct grammar of a 'balanced' piece on Trump sending chained immigrants to India!

This is a continuation of my blog on how, while the start-up-developed AI app DeepSeek is being criticized for consistently rejecting content related to China or Maoism, there appears to be no mention in Western media about why another app, developed by the powerful Google, Gemini, remains silent on Indian political issues.  

How the middle classes are returning to the BJP fold, be it Delhi or Gujarat: Mahakumbh, Sitharaman's budget

Whatever reasons may be offered for the Aam Aadmi Party's defeat in Delhi—whether it was the BJP's promises of more freebies than AAP, the shedding of ultra-nationalist slogans, or the successful demolition of Arvind Kejriwal's "Mr. Clean" image—my recent interaction with a group of middle-class individuals highlighted a notable trend. Those who had just begun to sit on the fence were now once again returning to the BJP fold.

Trump’s research cuts 'may mean' advantage China: But will India leverage global brain drain to its advantage?

When I heard from a couple of NRI professionals—currently on work visas and engaged in research projects at American universities—that one of President Donald Trump's major policy thrusts was to cut federal funding to the country's top educational institutions, I was instantly reminded of what Prof. Kaushik Basu had said while delivering a lecture in Ahmedabad.

Gujarat a police state? How top High Court advocate stunned a senior-most journalist

Rajdeep Sardesai, Anand Yagnik This is a continuation of my earlier blog on well-known journalist Rajdeep Sardesai's lecture in memory of the late Achyut Yagnik at the Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA). I was a little surprised when I received the intimation about the venue for the lecture.

Why burn Manusmriti? Why not preserve it to demonstrate, display historicity of casteism?

In a significant Facebook post, Rana Singh, former associate professor of English at Patna University, has revealed something that few seem to know. Titled "The Shudras in Manusmriti", Singh says,  because Manusmriti is discussed so often, he thought of reading it himself. “This book likely dates back to the 2nd or 3rd century BCE, and the presence of contradictory statements suggests that it is not the work of a single author,” he says in his Facebook post in Hindi, written in 2022 and recently reshared.

5% poor in India? Union govt claim debunked, '26.4% of population below poverty line'

A recent paper, referring to the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) 2022-23 of the Government of India (GoI), has debunked the official claim that poverty has substantially declined. Titled "Poverty in India: The Rangarajan Method and the 2022–23 Household Consumption Expenditure Survey", the paper —authored by scholars CA Sethu, LT Abhinav Surya, and CA Ruthu—states that "more than a quarter of India’s population falls below the poverty line."

Talking of increased corporate control over news, Rajdeep Sardesai 'evades' alternative media

When I received an intimation that well-known journalist Rajdeep Sardesai was to speak at the Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA) on February 2, my instant reaction was: I know what he is going to say—his views are quite well known; he wouldn’t be saying anything new. Yet, I decided to go and listen to him to catch his mood at a time when the media, as he (and I) knew it, is changing fast due to the availability of new technological tools that were not accessible even a decade ago.

A Hindu alternative to Valentine's Day? 'Shiv-Parvati was first love marriage in Universe'

  The other day, I was searching on Google a quote on Maha Shivratri which I wanted to send to someone, a confirmed Shiv Bhakt, quite close to me -- with an underlying message to act positively instead of being negative. On top of the search, I chanced upon an article in, imagine!, a Nashik Corporation site which offered me something very unusual.  I don't know who owns this site, for there is nothing on it in the About Us link. It merely says, the Nashik Corporation  site   "is an educational and news website of the municipal corporation. Today, education and payment of tax are completely online." It goes on to add, "So we provide some of the latest information about Property Tax, Water Tax, Marriage Certificate, Caste Certificate, etc. So all taxpayer can get all information of their municipal in a single place.some facts about legal and financial issues that different city corporations face, but I was least interested in them."  Surely, this didn't intere...