Representational image. | Arun Sankar / AFP
The dropout rate in India continues to stump both policymakers and educationists. The Unified District Information System for Education Plus 2019-’20 report released on June 29 does not give us much cause for celebration, especially when you compare it with another document “Education at a glance” put out by the Union Ministry of Education.
It has shown marginal difference since 2014-’15 but the pattern remains resolutely fixed.
What report says
A higher percentage of boys drop out at the primary level than girls (Class 1 to Class 5). However, at the upper primary level (Class 6 to Class 8), more girls than boys drop out. The dropout rate reverts to its original position at the secondary level (Class 9- Class 10) where a higher percentage of boys drop out than girls. This is how the situation was in 2014-’15 and this is how it is in 2019-’20.
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Surrealism is a permanent invitee in India’s political economy and systemic creativity is on exhibition in every session of Parliament.
The first week of the monsoon session produced a masterpiece. The government informed Parliament that “No deaths due to lack of oxygen has been specifically reported by states/UTs”. In art, surrealism is about unleashing the creative potential of an unconscious mind by means of irrational juxtapositions and combinations. In India’s political economy, surrealism is the outcome of conscious obfuscation of inadequacies.
The technically correct (after all the Union Government only conveys what States report) and politically disastrous articulation reflects the pervasion of apathy and insensitivity. Such is the state of affairs that the bureaucracy has erased the distinction between data and information, between deniability
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Rahul Singh
Primary education and healthcare should have been our top priorities after Independence. Lip service was paid, like the right to education of every child, but little was done on the ground. Only Kerala did so, becoming India’s most literate state with the best healthcare. Many other major developing countries, such as China and Indonesia, got their priorities right. In the 1940s, both had lower literacy rates than India’s and their average expectancy of life which is the best indicator of healthcare was also below ours. But within four decades, they had overtaken India in both these vital social parameters. Literacy and health are also crucial keys to economic growth, which is largely why many other developing countries have surged past us.
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