Raje’s Learning Curve
A move to turn over 300 state schools to private players draws flak. But there’s a slight uptick in enrolments
Vasundhara Raje’s decision to hand over 300 government secondary and senior secondary schools to private players as part of a new public-private partnership (PPP) experiment to improve school education has drawn much flak. Besides opposition Congress president Sachin Pilot, the CM’s own partymen, like MLA Gian Dev Ahuja, accuse her government of “abdicating” a primary responsibility.
Still in the works, the government says it’s a minuscule pilot project including barely two per cent of the 13,000 senior schools across Rajasthan. More significantly, officials say, it’s in keeping with a Niti Aayog report. Released recently, it cites data that shows plummeting learning levels in schools in the face of rising expenditure per student.
The Niti Aayog’s findings aren’t too different from what CM Raje discovered in 2015, before she ordered the closure or merger of 17,000 state-run schools with low or zero enrolment. In doing this, while she invited criticism from activists and political rivals, the payoff was evidently worth the trouble. For it did reverse the trend, if only slightly, of declining enrolments in government schools. The Niti Aayog too had red-flagged this.
“Our approach of merging schools has helped us to not only stop the drain from public schools but has reversed the flow from private ones,” says Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje. The Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2016 (ASER) released this January, shows that enrolment in government schools dipped from 60.4 per cent in 2010 to 52.2 in 2014 to rise again to 56.2 per cent in 2016. Digitisation to monitor student and teacher attendance and filling staff vacancies that had remained unfilled for decades have also contributed, says education minister Vasudev Devnani. Another game-changer has been the decision to appoint women principals even in all-boys and co-ed institutions.