Can education and health augment social capital?
NEW DELHI : Women and child development (WCD) secretary Rakesh Srivastava believes eliminating malnutrition among children is critical for the country to benefit from its young demography and that it must start from bottom of the pyramid.
Backed by a recent Rs12,000 crore central package for improving nutrition among children, Srivastava’s ministry has written to all district collectors to tackle the nutrition challenge where two out of every five children suffer from stunting.
“We have asked the district collectors and district magistrates to take responsibility for eliminating malnutrition in their districts,” Srivastava said.
What the WCD ministry is looking to do is indicative of a bigger realization and shift that is undergoing at both federal and state levels across India irrespective of the party in power.
From improving child nutrition to reducing maternal mortality, from school education to reproductive health, from skills development to menstrual hygiene, there seems to a renewed focus on improving social and human capital.
“If India wishes to benefit from its young demography, it has to work sincerely on two key sectors: health and education. While primary health and early child hood health is a must, in case of education, we have to focus on school education and allied segments like teacher education to make young Indians healthy and learn well to shape their own future and that of the country,” said A. Santosh Mathew, chairman of National Council of Teacher Education during an interaction in September. Mathew is now working hard to reshape teacher education by making it oriented to output rather than infrastructure. India suffers learning deficits at most of its 1.5 million schools.
Several states are focusing attention on education and health to correct the situation. Delhi education minister Manish Sisodia’s Twitter profile says, “Lets work on Classroom Revolution to save the country…”.
The Aaam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi allocates almost 25% of its state budget to education. It has opened some schools with superior infrastructure, and is adding 10,000 classrooms in government schools and sending teachers to Ivy league universities and Indian Institutes of Management for training.
Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal does not hesitate to say that education and health are election issues for his party, an unusual break from traditional political rhetoric.
Kerala is looking to make public schools high-tech by April 2018. Rajasthan too is looking at reforming school education.
It is planning to merge small schools in a particular locality to better utilize their infrastructure and focus on quality enhancement.
The state is not hesitating to work with leading private players
SEVERAL STATES ARE FOCUSING ATTENTION ON EDUCATION AND HEALTH SECTORS TO CORRECT THE SITUATION
to improve its government schools.
“Of late, several state governments including Rajasthan has started giving a renewed focus on school education. India needs low-cost education and healthcare without compromising quality concerns,” said Amrish Chandra, group president, GEMS Education India, the Indian arm of a Dubai-based education group that is working with several Indian states.
On the health front, the central government has made several steps towards tackling hunger and malnutrition, menstrual hygiene, reproductive rights and family planning.
But there is still a long way to go – at least 840,000 infants died in India in 2016 as per official figures, and in education, one out of every two school-going children cannot read a text meant for three levels below as per the ASER report.
Its secondary students’ performance was placed 73rd among 74 countries in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study of 2009-10 published in 2011.
India now aims to return to the prestigious PISA study conducted by Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) in 2021.