Introduction

In this note, I critically evaluate and summarise official statistics on schooling infrastructure and on children’s participation in elementary schooling in rural India. My focus of attention here is the data available on schooling facilities and on delivery of schooling (measured by school attendance or lack of it), and I separately discuss issues related to these data.

Schooling Infrastructure

There are two main sources of official data on schooling infrastructure in India.

1. The All India School Education Survey (AISES), conducted by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). This survey has been conducted in 1957, 1965, 1973, 1978, 1986, 1998, 2002, and 2009.¹ Detailed data at the level of individual schools are available from the sixth (1998) and seventh (2002) surveys. The results of the eighth round of AISES, conducted in 2009, are not yet available.

2. The District Information System for Education (DISE), developed and maintained by the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA). DISE was initiated in 1995–96 for monitoring evaluation of the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) and was later integrated with the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) as a monitoring tool. It was implemented in 42 districts to begin with and then extended, in stages, to cover all the districts of the country. A large amount of information collected as a part of DISE is made available at the level of individual schools, as well as in aggregated form at the district, State and national levels.

Both the All India School Education Survey and the District Information System for Education provide detailed information on schooling facilities (physical infrastructure and human resources) and on school enrolment. In recent years, the data collection of AISES and DISE has become more systematic. Information is now available from these sources disaggregated all the way down to the level of individual schools. In particular, detailed and disaggregated data are provided on type of building, number of classrooms, availability of toilets, availability of drinking water facilities, and availability of electricity.

AISES and DISE aim at a census-type coverage of schools and their coverage has improved over the years. The seventh AISES, conducted in 2002, surveyed about 10 lakh schools. In 2002–03 DISE was implemented in 462 out of 486 districts in India, but it covered only 853,601 schools. The coverage expanded considerably after DISE was integrated with SSA and extended to States not covered under DPEP (Table 1). By 2008–09, DISE covered over 13 lakh schools. It may be pointed out that while the absolute number of schools covered by AISES and DISE is large, we do not have a measure of the extent of coverage as a proportion of all existing schools in the country.

The data presented in Table 2 can be used as a rough measure indicating the inadequacy of classrooms in elementary schools across different States. It should be pointed out that if one room per grade is taken to be the minimum norm for adequacy of classrooms, the estimates presented in Table 2 are likely to be an enormous underestimate of the inadequacy of classrooms because they include upper primary schools with students up to grades VII/VIII. The table shows that in 2008–09 about 4.3 per cent of rural elementary schools in India had no classrooms at all, while another 8.4 per cent had only a single classroom. State-wise, about 22 per cent of rural elementary schools in Bihar and Jharkhand had no classrooms at all. More than 20 per cent of rural elementary schools in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Meghalaya had only one classroom. About 57 per cent of rural elementary schools in India had less than four classrooms. In Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Assam, and Meghalaya, over 70 per cent of rural elementary schools had less than four classrooms.

Table 3 presents data for 2008–09 on the proportion of rural elementary schools that did not have drinking water facilities, toilet facilities, and electricity. About 13 per cent of rural elementary schools in India did not have drinking water facilities in that year. Drinking water facilities were not available in more than 25 per cent of rural elementary schools in Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Jharkhand, and Nagaland.

About 16 per cent of rural elementary schools in India did not have any toilet facilities, while about 49 per cent of these schools did not have separate toilets for girls. The proportion of schools without separate toilets for girls was more than 75 per cent in Meghalaya, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Jammu and Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, and Tripura.

It is shocking to note that 70 per cent of rural elementary schools in India did not have electricity connections in 2008–09. The worst performing State on this parameter was Bihar where over 97 per cent of rural elementary schools did not have electricity. In Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Tripura, Assam, and Jharkhand, over 85 per cent of these schools did not have electricity.

Teachers in Schools

The school-based statistics also provide information on the number of teachers in schools. In the DISE statistics, data on teachers are given disaggregated by sex, by the social group (SC, ST, and OBC) to which they belong, and by type of management of schools (government, government–aided, and private–unaided). Data are also provided on the number of teachers hired on regular contracts and on short-term contracts.

The adequacy of teachers in a school should be measured by comparing the number of teachers in the school with the number of grades in that school. A primary/upper-primary school must have at least one teacher per grade and at least one teacher for physical training, sport and extra-curricular activities. Published reports of DISE do not provide information that can be used to measure the adequacy of teachers in rural schools on the basis of such a norm.² They provide data on the proportion of rural schools under different categories that had only a single teacher. While these data provide a useful benchmark, they cannot be used satisfactorily to estimate the inadequacy of teachers in rural schools. Table 4 presents State-level data on this benchmark for 2008–09. The table shows that about 14 per cent of all primary schools in rural India had only one teacher. State-wise, this proportion was the highest in Arunachal Pradesh (65.2 per cent), followed by Goa (34.2 per cent), Assam (33.7 per cent) and Rajasthan (32 per cent).

Rates of School Attendance

The statistics on education in India may be divided into two groups: data collected from schools and data collected through household surveys.

Data on how many children are in school are available from school-based statistics as well as from household survey-based statistics. The data collected from schools on the number of children enrolled in schools, however, are grossly inaccurate. The main problem with these school-based statistics is that there is large-scale over-reporting of enrolment figures by the schools, in particular primary schools, covered by these surveys. The data collected from households provide a more accurate picture of how many children in different age groups are in school and how many are out of school.

The main official sources that collect data on school attendance are the Census of India, and the Surveys on Employment and Unemployment, and Surveys on Education by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). Of these, the most recent data are available from the NSSO’s 64th round Survey on Education in India.

Another large-scale household survey, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), also provides statistics on school attendance. Three rounds of NHFS, corresponding to 1992-93, 1998-99 and 2005-06, have been conducted so far. Although the analysis in this note is mainly based on statistics from the Census of India and the NSS Surveys on Employment and Unemployment., broadly comparable NFHS statistics on school attendance, from the 2005-06 survey, have been provided in Appendix Table A1 for reference.

Age-specific attendance rates are defined in terms of the proportion of children in a specified age group who are attending school (at any level). In Census of India, 2001, data on school attendance are given in Census Table C10 (Population attending educational institution by age, sex, and type of educational institution).³ These data can be used to calculate age-specific attendance rates.⁴ Age-specific attendance rates can also be calculated using the usual status activity status in the NSSO’s Surveys on Employment and Unemployment, and Surveys on Education.

Table 5 gives age-specific attendance rates for the age groups 6–11 years and 6–14 years for 1991, 2001, 2004–05, 2007–08, and 2009–10, using Census and NSSO data. Although these estimates are based on different surveys, a broad comparison indicates the direction and relative levels of change. These data suggest that although a substantial rise in attendance rates, particularly among girl children, took place over the decade of the 2000s, a substantial task remains in ensuring that all children attend school. For reference, State-wise age-specific attendance rates for rural and urban children in the age group 6–14 years, calculated using data from the NSSO’s Survey of Employment and Unemployment, 2009–10, are provided in Appendix Table A2.

Gross Attendance Ratio is defined as the number of children who attend school at a particular level of schooling (say, primary school) as a proportion of the population of children in the official age group for that level of schooling (say, primary school-going age). Table 6 provides State-level data on Gross Attendance Ratios for grades I to VIII. Net Attendance Ratio is defined as the number of children in the official school-going age who are enrolled in schools as a proportion of the population of children in the official school-going age. Table 7 provides State-wise data on Net Attendance Ratios for grades I to VIII. Data from the NSSO Survey on Education show that, at the all-India level, Gross Attendance Ratios for grades I–VIII were 99 per cent for boys and 95 per cent for girls (Table 6). Net Attendance Ratios for grades I–VIII were 87 per cent for boys and 84 per cent for girls (Table 7). Among all Indian States, Bihar had the lowest Gross (86 per cent) and Net (74 per cent) Attendance Ratios at the primary and upper primary levels (grades I–VIII) (Tables 6 and 7). Mizoram (97 per cent), Himachal Pradesh (96 per cent), and Kerala (94 per cent) had the highest Net Attendance Ratios (Table 7). The gap between male and female Gross Attendance Ratios was the highest (14 percentage points) in Rajasthan (Table 6). It is also worth noting that there was a substantial difference between overall Gross and Net Attendance Ratios. This was primarily on account of a substantial number of late starters and over-aged children who were enrolled at the primary and upper primary levels.

Rates of School Attendance among Rural Children

A major limitation of statistics collected from schools is that they cannot be used to separately study the access of rural and urban children to schools. Since many children from rural areas attend schools located in urban areas, separately measuring Gross Enrolment Rate (GER) and Net Enrolment Rate (NER) for rural and urban areas using school enrolment statistics is not meaningful. Similarly, measuring GER and NER for small geographical units – say, a village or (particularly for higher levels of schooling) even a block – using school-level data is not meaningful if many of the children are enrolled in schools outside these locations (or if children from outside come to study in that location). In contrast, household-based statistics can be used to separately measure Age-specific Attendance Ratio, Gross Attendance Ratio, and Net Attendance Ratio for rural and urban children, as well as for children at any other level of disaggregation.

Table 8 gives data on age-specific school attendance rates separately for rural and urban children, using data from the Censuses of India and NSSO surveys. These data show that despite a large increase in school attendance rates among children over the last 20 years, a substantial gap remains in school attendance rates between urban and rural children, and, in particular, rural girls. The table shows that over 16 per cent of rural girls and 12 per cent of rural boys in the age group 6–14 years did not attend school.

Tables 9 and 10 provide Gross and Net Attendance Ratios for grades I–V and grades VI–VIII for rural children. Rural Net Attendance Ratios for grades I–VIII were the lowest in the case of Bihar (74 per cent), and highest in the case of Mizoram (97 per cent) and Himachal Pradesh (96 per cent).

Estimates of Out-of-School Children

As a result of the inflated figures for school enrolment, the number of out-of-school children is hugely underestimated in official documents. According to the Census data for 2001, 6.5 crore children in the age group 6–14 years were out of school. According to the NSSO data for 2004–05, the number of out-of-school children in the age group 6–14 years was over 3 crores. According to NSSO data from the 66th round Survey on Employment and Unemployment, in 2009–10, 2.2 crore children in the age group 6–14 years were not attending school. It is worth noting that both these estimates are substantially higher than other estimates, which vary between 76 lakhs (SSA) and 1.4 crores (SRI and EdCIL 2010).⁵

Recent policy initiatives for universalising elementary education and bringing down the number of out-of-school children have focused on containing the number of drop-outs. Reduction of the drop-out rate in schools to 10 per cent was one of the most important objectives of DPEP when it was launched in 1994.⁶ In recent years, several State governments have launched initiatives under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to improve retention at the primary school stage. However, as per the official estimates, the drop-out rate in India at the level of primary schooling continues to be over 30 per cent.

It is fairly evident that drop-out rates are overestimated in school enrolment statistics through over-reporting of students enrolled at the primary level and under-counting of students at the upper primary level. Existing studies point out that one of the reasons for the high drop-out rate in India is “fictitious enrolment” of children in primary schools (Jayachandran 2007, Venkatanarayana 2009).

The NSSO surveys specifically ask whether children who are currently attending an educational institution had been to school at some time and then dropped out, or if they had never attended school. Data from the 64th round Survey on Education show that, of 2.6 crore out-of-school children, about 61 per cent had never been to school. Data from the 66th round Employment and Unemployment Survey (for 2009–10) show that, of 2.1 crore out-of-school children in the age group 6–14 years, about 70 per cent had never been to school, while the remaining had enrolled in school at some time but dropped out. This was also borne out by a household survey conducted under SSA, which showed that 68 per cent of out-of-school children in the age group 6–13 years had never attended school while 32 per cent had dropped out at some stage (SRI and EdCIL 2010).

Figure 1 shows that children who have never been to school constitute the majority of children who are out of school, particularly in States where attendance rates are low. Figure 2 shows a clear positive relationship between the proportion of drop-outs among children who are out of school and school attendance rates in different NSSO regions. Both the figures suggest that in States which lag the most in respect of school attendance, a large proportion of out-of-school children are those who have never been to school.

NSSO surveys as well as data from the Censuses of India can be used to examine the pattern of age-specific attendance rates. These data show that among rural children, age-specific attendance rates peak between ages 9 and 11 (see Figure 3). This also suggests that in the age group 6–14 years, a substantial part of the gap in universal school attendance is on account of late starters and those who have never gone to school. The NSSO data show that a large drop in age-specific attendance rates – reflecting an acceleration in drop-out rates – takes place after the age of 14 years (Figure 3).

Concluding Remarks

One of the gravest failures of development policy in post-independence India has been the inability to ensure that all children attend school. The gaps in respect of provision of adequate schooling facilities and in respect of the proportion of children who continue to be out of school are particularly high in rural India.

Official statistics on school education have been extremely misleading, and some of the agencies involved in the collection of these data have done great disservice to the cause of universalisation of school education by providing misleading statistics. Data on school education in India are collected at the school level and the household level. The data collected from schools, which form the basis for official estimates of school enrolment, provide hugely inflated estimates of the proportion of children regularly attending school. Such statistics have been used to underplay the problem and to underestimate the resources required to ensure free schooling for all children (Ramachandran, Rawal, and Swaminathan 1997). Over-reporting of school enrolment at initial levels of schooling results in overestimation of drop-outs, when most of the children recorded as drop-outs have actually never attended school. Such distortion of data results in inappropriate policy formulation with little focus on identifying out-of-school children and bringing them to school.

Another important limitation of the school-based statistics is that they cannot be used to separately study the access of rural children to schooling. Since a substantial number of rural children attend schools located in urban areas, rates of school attendance among them must be measured through household surveys and not through school-based statistics.

In view of the above, it is clear that household survey-based data from the Censuses of India and NSSO surveys should form the basis for official estimates of rates of school attendance and the number of out-of-school children.

A comparison of data on school attendance ratios for children aged 6–14 years from the Censuses of India and various rounds of NSSO surveys suggests that although there has been considerable improvement in school attendance rates, a very substantial lag remains among rural children. According to the 66th round NSSO Survey on Employment and Unemployment, about 2.2 crore children in this age group did not attend school. Of these out-of-school children, about 1.8 crores were rural children. It is worth noting that this estimate of the number of out-of-school children is about three times the estimate of out-of-school children under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.

In terms of attendance rates, these data show that about 14 per cent of rural children aged 6–14 years were not attending school. The Gross Attendance Ratio among rural children was 97 per cent and the Net Attendance Ratio, 85 per cent. In respect of the Net Attendance Ratio among rural children, the worst performing States in India were Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Arunachal Pradesh, and Meghalaya. The gap between attendance ratios among rural boys and rural girls was highest in Rajasthan.

While the usefulness of school-based statistics for measurement of participation in schooling is limited, they are of great use in estimating gaps in availability of schooling facilities. It may be argued that collection of data on schooling facilities (including physical infrastructure, teaching aids, and human resources) should be the main focus of the District Information System on Education (DISE) and the All India School Education Survey (AISES). The annual coverage of DISE has expanded to over 13 lakh schools. This needs to be further expanded, particularly in some States, to ensure near-complete coverage. At the same time, to avoid duplication and wastage of resources, AISES needs to be restructured as a sample survey that will provide a useful check on the reliability of DISE statistics. The field operations for such a sample survey should be conducted by a competent agency like the National Sample Survey Organisation.

In this note, I have provided the latest statistics on some selected indicators of gaps in schooling facilities in rural India. Some of the highlights of these data for 2008–09 are as follows.

• About 57 per cent of rural elementary (primary and upper primary) schools in India had less than four classrooms. The proportion of rural schools that do not have one classroom per grade is substantially higher.
• About 13 per cent of rural elementary schools in India did not have drinking water facilities.
• About 16 per cent of rural elementary schools in India did not have any toilet facilities.
• About 49 per cent of rural elementary schools in India did not have separate toilets for girls.
• About 70 per cent of rural elementary schools in India did not have electricity.
• About 14 per cent of all rural primary schools in India had only one teacher.

The data presented in this note show that there continue to be substantial gaps in schooling facilities and access of rural children to elementary schooling in India. The absolute levels of lack of adequate schooling facilities and the number of out-of-school children are seriously underestimated in school-based statistics. However, school-based statistics provide useful proportional estimates of gaps in facilities. Household survey-based data provide a more accurate picture of school attendance rates than data collected from schools. Household survey-based data also provide useful disaggregated estimates of school attendance rates among rural and urban children.