India Election 2014: Bird’s Eye View

The political arena is heating up in India as the next general election is less than five months away. The performance of the current ruling coalition government, Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), has been far below expectation. There is a wide-spread disappointment with the Congress party as reflected by numerous media-surveys and recent state-election results. The government has been struck with policy paralyses, indecisiveness, and numerous large scale corruption charges. There is a general sense that the Congress party has serious credibility issues and has lost touch with the people.  

            National politics in India primarily has three coalition groups: Congress led UPA; BJP led NDA (National Democratic Alliance); and the third front consisting of various regional parties unwilling to sit with either Congress or BJP. There can be a fourth front led by the left parties and other regional parties who find it difficult to sit with either of the first three coalition groups; but this group is unlikely to have significant number as per the current trend. The third front does not have a clear leader and projects a politically unstable formation. Also, the third front is highly unlikely to be in position to form a government without support from Congress or BJP. Therefore, given Congress’ dire state, theoretically, it should have been easy for the main opposition party, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), to claim for a clear mandate in the upcoming elections. All BJP had to do was to find someone who projected three traits: clear policy-driven governance, decisiveness, and non-corrupt image. However, BJP went ahead an extra-mile and projected Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate who not only projected those three traits but also brought-in the baggage of 2002 communal riots. Though no court has found any direct role of Mr. Modi in the rioting, his opponents have targeted him for more than a decade now as he served as the chief minister during riots in which two-thirds of the victims were Muslims in a Hindu Majority state. In addition, BJP’s claim as a party of incorruptible has limited takers as many of its politicians have been charged with big corruption scandals. This created a political vacuum for a party with absolute incorruptible and secular credentials. AAP (Aam Aadmi Party or the common men party) is exactly addressing this gap.

AAP was formed last year by a group of anti-corruption activists led by Arvind Kejriwal. In its political debut, it triumphed and formed a government in Delhi. Though the party is in nascent stage, it hopes to make the most of the political vacuum discussed above. Both media and established political players hyperbolize and sensationalize AAP’s positives and negatives. In Delhi, Congress has given outside support to AAP; and is happy to shoot at BJP from AAP’s shoulder with election 2014 in sight. While it is a real possibility that AAP cuts down a few vital BJP seats making government formation an uphill task for Modi, it poses a greater threat for the Congress. Though AAP consists of individuals with varied world-views, its overall outlook seems center-left with elements of direct democracy governance-model.  Ideologically, there is little difference between AAP and Congress. Apart from its legacy, the Congress has little to offer what the AAP cannot. But AAP can offer non-corrupt, non-dynastic and non-nepotistic profile which the Congress cannot. AAP has already influenced the national political discourse. There is a clear swing in favor of anti-corruption and more transparency in governance at various levels. Many politicians across parties have adapted to austerity. Nonetheless, AAP has a long way to go before it actually challenges any of the established parties at the center. Most importantly, it has to develop party-cadre at grassroots across the nation, and demonstrate acumen of governance and ability to work with other parties. If it succeeds nationally, it will, at best, be able to challenge the BJP and substitute the Congress in the long run.

BJP is primarily banking on the Modi-wave. AAP has certainly made things difficult, but Modi’s political acuteness is still unparalleled. Modi’s words and actions set issues and agenda for national political debates. A fairly significant section of people, especially the youth, consists of those who do not identify with the camp of religious hardliners and who cannot tolerate misgovernance, inefficiency and rampant corruption. It seems that Modi had grasped this voter dilemma long back. For past few years, he has been trying hard to reach out. He talks about governance, economy, technology, environment and developmental issues. However, his biggest challenge is to control his right-wing followers from ruining his efforts to accommodate potential voters who buy his governance and “India First” credentials [Note: Modi defines secularism as India First. It is a rhetoric, but the basic idea is that the policies should be in interest of all Indians and not just certain sections of caste/religion]. It is difficult to say if Modi’s right-wing hardliners are destroying his potential vote bank of liberal youth across religious lines, rather than consolidating his Hindu vote-bank. Educated youth may find it difficult to sit in the same camp with religious hardliners, who tend to impose their world-view on others. It will be interesting to see how Modi performs this balancing-act in coming days.

Whether the Indians create BJP’s Modi-wave, AAP’s political revolution, or maintain Congress’ grand-old Nehru-Gandhi dynasty rule, only time will tell. We will have to wait, but not too long.  

Mechanism for Educational Excellence in India: Towards Solution

As discussed in blog-post entitled, Indian Education: Macro-level Systematic Problems, India needs a mechanism that connects national educational objectives with policy formulation, educational field practices and their continuous evaluation for course correction in policies. In this post, I briefly present a mechanism which may help establish such linkages while gradually decentralizing policy making. Note that the mechanism is not a solution in itself, but a means to collectively find solutions for in-numerous educational problems through informed inquiry.

The Mechanism

Education is primarily a state issue. Therefore, each state may like to set up a team of world-class interdisciplinary researchers for examining effects of potential interventions, evaluating current social/educational programs, and producing policy-relevant research. A trans-disciplinary approach in solving educational issues may help devise interventions and policies which in turn may drive holistic social transformation of communities. In addition to this prime responsibility of knowledge production, this team has three other duties: 1) regularly briefing state-level administrators and working closely for policy formulations; 2) engaging with the media and communicating educational issues, interventions, study-results, policies to the common citizens; and 3) developing next generation of researchers who get posted in district-level research teams.

Also, the university faculty members may be encouraged to contribute to this knowledge production through tenure-track that encourages empirical research. The present practice of most Indian universities looking only at the seniority of the faculty member for promotion needs to be re-examined.  Furthermore, the present leadership structure in Indian universities is ill-fitted for the pursuit of excellence and knowledge production. In his lecture on the higher education systems around the world, Prof. Heyneman (PennGSEVideoLab, 2013) made an excellent point explaining the difference between the top ranking American universities and the universities in the developing nations. The leadership structure in top ranking American university is very conducive for continuous pursuit of excellence. The board of visitors (mainly, donors and alumni) appoint the president of the university on contract-bases and pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars. In order to get this lucrative job, the highly-skilled candidates have to present institutional goals and action plans for the same – how the institution will achieve and maintain excellence, increase research output, generate required resources and take all stake-holders on board. Therefore, from the day one, the president has a mission and s/he is highly accountable. On the other hand, the appointment of Vice-Chancellors in most of the universities in developing nations (including India) is based on job-seniority, personal influences, or even political loyalties. There is hardly any vision or action-plan presented for the institutional growth. In total, neither the institution leaders nor the faculty members face any negative consequences for not contributing to the knowledge production even at premier institutions.

In the subsequent phases, the research capacity can be developed at district-level and cluster-level to address more specific local issues. Also, states may design policies which encourage districts to develop data-systems and capacity for carrying out data-driven reforms. It may take at least a couple of decades to establish this entire mechanism at cluster-level, but we can eventually have a self-correcting mechanism where research informs policy, which is well connected with the field-practices; and these practices are continuously evaluated. Decentralization could help devise policies which are sensitive to the needs of local context. Note that the centre needs to play an important role in establishing national educational priorities, funding and coordinating various intervention programmes and research, and maintaining uniformity across educational curriculums and minimum standards across states.

In conclusion, a lot of research has already been done in the world. What works elsewhere should never be directly implemented in India, but definitely be considered as a hypothesis for experimental/quasi-experimental studies. Many major  interventions like – voucher programme; performance-based teacher pay; designing effective tenure-track for teachers, principals, district administrators; professional development programmes; interventions promoting learning through inquiry in students; counselling services and special-education programmes; technological interventions; and interventions to encourage parent-involvement – all need to be studied in various social contexts across India. The country is so diverse that what may work in one context may produce absolutely disastrous results in another. A few educational research institutions that the country is relying on at present are simply incapable of lifting this massive load of improving its mass-education system. India needs to put development of an indigenous pool of policy-relevant knowledge on high priority. If it succeeds in establishing the linkages between knowledge production, policy formulation, and field practices as shown in the Figure 1, it will be one of the major transformational phenomena of this century.

DO SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS.

The following video talks about the above mentioned self-correcting mechanism in more detail. Presented by Kathan Shukla (Author of Education in India: A Globian Perspective; & Blogger, Globian Perspective)

 

Please feel free to comment/give feedback and to share with others. 

हिंदी के लिए नीचेका विडियो देखे: 

For Hindi, watch the following video presentation:

Interesting Facebook Conversation on India's Education

In this post, I’d like to share an interesting Facebook conversation with Mr. Sundara Velavan, faculty at Institute of Language Management, Tamil Nadu. Sundara raised important questions which led to discussions on programs like Teach for India, state’s role in education, decentralization and standardization and so on. While responding to Sundara, I presented my opinions on a gamut of educational issues. So, please feel free to comment on whether you agree/ disagree/ or would like to add more points to this discussion. The conversation began as I posted Economist’s article on Teach for America on wall of a facebook group, Centre forContemporary Educational Reform.  

Kathan Shukla

Are there any studies examining the impact of this sort of projects in India? A lot of NGOs are in the field, but is the bigger picture pleasant?
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/economist-explains-7

Why is Teach for America controversial?

www.economist.com

TEACH FOR AMERICA (TFA), a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1990, places its young “corps members” at schools in poor areas to teach for two...

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Like ·  · Unfollow Post · Share · September 19 at 6:24pm

Sundara Velavan What are your thoughts on this Kathan Shukla ?

September 20 at 11:33am · Like

Kathan Shukla haha... Sundara Velavan, putting me on the spot :O OK. At micro-level I think it's nice to see youth going to gov. schools, teaching, getting involved in development. Most are motivated and really want to do something and children also benefit from them. Definitely, the learning gets a push overall. However, at macro-level, the rationale for this flows in this direction: gov education is a failure -> So, NGOs need to get involved. The role should be that of a catalyst: carry out intervention, build capacity of gov people, create sustainable setup and get out of the system. However, they remain there forever and gradually expand. Simultaneously, the government shrinks its responsibility. So, we end up creating a scenario where government's capacity is reduced and the system is dependent on these NGOs, who in the long-run behave as parallel governments (as seen in many developing countries). And in case if they shut down for some reason, god knows what happens to those children. In all this, the quality of education remains un-addressed. Moreover, there remains grave concerns of deprofessionalisation of teaching profession. I don't know any hospital that would allow me to perform a surgery, or a court that would allow me to judge a case after 15-20 days of training. What joke we have made out of teachers!

September 20 at 4:49pm · Like · 4

Kathan Shukla To resolve this dilemma, we need methodologically robust empirical studies at every level across various social contexts. We all may have diverse opinions/intuitions, but the policy should not rely on that. There has to be solid bases - possibly numerous studies which help us arrive at causal inferences of short term long term effects of such NGOs.

September 20 at 4:56pm · Like · 2
Sundara Velavan Kathan Shukla Are you trying to imply that the state should be the sole provider and bear the sole/primary responsibility of educating our children and our youth?

September 22 at 1:53am · Like

Kathan Shukla In theory, yes, at least for basic education. Biggest argument comes from the preamble of our constitution. Ideally, basic education opportunity should not be dependent on socio-economic status. Most high performing education systems across world are public. With all their problems, even the Chinese have developed excellent public education system in cities. Also, our goal should be to have minimum variation across schools across entire nation. The privatization will always increase this variance as the present economic inequality comes in the equation. However, in practice, we all know the governments across India are incapable of providing top quality education. My diagnosis is that the problem is of governance & policy-making. All these years we have hardly studied our educational issues systematically. So, the policymakers are always clueless about what works. Hence, my earlier argument of empirical studies. It is also true that the socialist lobby uses the above equality argument to put more government controls on private schools. Cutting short the privatization is the worst thing. It's like saying -'all should be in non-functional schools and not just the poor'. In current scenario, if I were in policy-making, I would rather avoid the public/private debate and just focus on better quality education. Be pragmatic, study what works and just do it. Note that many privatization-proponents favour 'school voucher' programmes, where poor children can study in private school and the government pays the fee. However, that has not really worked in many studies in US. As always, we don't have sufficient knowledge for India. Centre for Civil society does some advocacy research, but as far as I know they have mixed results.

September 22 at 10:22pm · Like · 1

Sundara Velavan Thank you for your patient response!

September 22 at 11:36pm · Unlike · 1

Subir Shukla Brilliant analysis there Kathan Shukla! Agree with every word of what you say.

September 24 at 3:32am · Unlike · 1

Kathan Shukla thanks for a kind note, Subir. Sundara, credit to you for inquiring 

September 24 at 4:53am · Like

Sundara Velavan If you would allow, I'd like to pick on what you've said, 'Also, our goal should be to have minimum variation in schools across the nation'. Could you share which parameters you are stressing that mustn't vary?

September 24 at 5:04am · Like

Kathan Shukla In the first phase, all inputs that the children get in schools. And goal should be to achieve invariant mean student achievement across schools. In other words, average academic achievement of one school should not be significantly different from other schools. Gradually, we can expand this invariance to desired non-academic outcomes. Considering this for India is too abstract. But, we can at least begin from a cluster level, where all schools within that cluster become high achieving.

September 24 at 5:30am · Like

Hema Khatri I agree with what Kathan Shukla says. In fact, I feel before trying to intervene directly by teaching the children and management of school, the focus should be on Teacher Trainings by empowering the government school/ municipal school teachers and equipping them with same set of skills that these young 'corporate sanyaasis' use for teaching the kids and running schools efficiently. There is need for changing their overall approach towards teaching as a profession and trust and capacity building at the level of school teachers and school management.

September 24 at 6:41am · Like

Sundara Velavan Kathan, Hardly would anyone dispute that high student achievement is necessary/desirable. But the does kind of uniformity that you talk about take into account the diversity of India and the uniqueness of everyone of her children? Is it consistent with the concept of 'local knowledge' articulated in the National Curriculum Framework (NCF 2005) and with the views of prominent educationists like Sir Ken Robinson?

September 24 at 7:32am · Like · 1

Kathan Shukla Oh... I'm referring to uniformity across schools (average achievement), not students. Within schools there will always be variation across student achievement. Individual differences can be accommodated within school-level.

September 24 at 7:48am · Like

Sundara Velavan As I understand, your statement implies that while students within a school may be different, the schools themselves are similar to one another in terms of curriculum, value systems, infrastructure, parental aspirations and culture. Only in such a case can we propose common parameters of student achievement.

September 24 at 9:28am · Like

Kathan Shukla Yes, to some extent. Non-school variables (parental aspirations, socio-economic status, other cultural aspects) are beyond the control of policymakers. So, got to invest more (in teacher quality, leadership, infrastructure etc) in schools where those variables affect the achievement negatively. But, the goal should be to have minimum variation across schools. Also, curriculum can certainly be flexible and localized. Researchers often define student achievement as math, sci & reading scores on standardized test (which can be scaled and linked keeping in mind language/curricula variation). Doing this at India level can be the goal for next 50-70yrs. Even small homogeneous country like Finland took 2 decades. The Chinese did it in many cities in about 1 decade. We can at least begin it at cluster-level (approx. 30-50 schools).

September 24 at 11:54am · Like

Sundara Velavan I really appreciate your patience Kathan . Here are my last set of questions: 1. 'Is policy the only instrument in educational reform on which we must place all our bets?2. Math, Science and reading are important, but depending on your socioeconomic context, so are fishing, weaving, dancing, reciting mantras, honey collection and many other skills. Do you think that policy needs to make space for such alternatives as well?If yes, how? If no, why not?3. Do you think that a top- down, centrally controlled approach is the best way forward in solving our educational woes? 4. Will structuring education, which is the process by which learning is facilitated, on the principles of uniformity and minimal variation, which usually are associated with inanimate objects, help retain the human element in education? 5. What kind of an impact will the push for standardization have on holistic learning and development? I know the questions are many but I'm sure you understand the common undercurrent. 

September 24 at 1:19pm · Edited · Like

Kathan Shukla I highly appreciate these questions and would love to hear other people's perspective. This is such an interesting conversation. I'll respond pretty soon 

September 24 at 1:11pm · Like · 1

Kathan Shukla OK. 1) Policy only gives a direction in which we should move as a country. For educational reforms, we will always need a multidimensional approach. Clear linkage of national objectives-> creation of relevant knowledge-pool -> policy -> practices -> continuous policy evaluation, which adds to the knowledge-pool. Things will improve if all stakeholders are on-board (from students to politicians and all in-between). 2) Math/sci/reading can be the primary outcomes of interest to assess school quality (only for research purpose). The policymakers/researchers need that knowledge to design interventions and to evaluate those interventions. All other aspects of the school have to be localized and sensitive to local culture. (3) Certainly not. I hate the top-down approach. In fact, I'd say that primary reason for poor educational outcomes across the country is DELHI (not the city but centralized decision-making). Centre's job is to coordinate state-policies and provide funds for knowledge production and various social-programmes. At present, the states need to start establishing the linkage as mentioned in first point. Gradually, we can bring that research & decision-making capacity to districts, then talukas, and even cluster-level (let's say over next 7, 15 & 25 years, respectively). Let people figure-out their local problems. (4) I'm not sure if I understand this question. It would be great if you can make it clearer what you mean by 'structuring education'. (5) I'm talking about standardized tests for research purpose to make informed policy decisions. That helps keeping the measurement error down (unbiased inferences). A lot of people in western-world argue against it because here the results are used to assess teachers and for punishing schools with lesser funding. I don't favour that use of test-results. Our tests (e.g., board exams) have extremely low reliability. The score will be different if different people assess the answer-sheet. I think that's unfair, right? Hence, standardized tests.

September 24 at 1:41pm · Like · 1

Sundara Velavan I don't know what to say except for thanking you for your patience! And yes, your point on gradual decentralization answers the fourth question to an extent. Thanks again Kathan. It indeed was a delightful conversation! 

September 24 at 1:50pm · Edited · Like · 3

Kathan Shukla Sundara, how can I add you to my friend list?

September 24 at 1:52pm · Like · 1