India is set to become the third largest economy in the world by 2030 all the while being home to the largest and youngest workforce (those between 15 and 64). As the rest of the world’s powers deal with ageing populations,
India is set to become the third largest economy in the world by 2030 all the while being home to the largest and youngest workforce (those between 15 and 64). As the rest of the world’s powers deal with ageing populations, this feature puts India in a comparatively advantageous position. To properly utilise India’s workforce so as to ensure a ‘demographic dividend’ – a phrase thrown around frequently in relation to India – there are several issues that the country must address. Prominent ones are ensuring that unemployment rates are low and that the population possesses relevant skills with access to basic requisites like education. While there has been an apparent effort in recent years to address these issues, the status of education, especially in the primary sector, has been slow to improve.
The last three decades of economic research have increasingly revealed how important the role of primary education is to human resource development, and so, economic development. While India has, since the 1990s, launched several programmes to tackle the problem of educational programmes that have poor reach, the country still has a long way to go.
The latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), which came out in 2016, showed some improvements from previous years but reflected the dire situation of primary education in India today. The report covered 589 districts and over 562 thousand students. It showed that learning levels remain low; while 97% of rural children aged between 6-14 years are enrolled in schools, a mere 13% of grade two students can read from their language texts. The report finds that
“even in the upper primary grades, significant proportions of populations still struggle with foundational skills”
The percentage of children in grade five who can read a grade two level text reduced from 53.7% in 2010 to 47.8% in 2016; this phenomenon is worse in government schools, with a drop from 51% to 42% for the same years. The report further indicates that children start falling behind in the early primary phase itself, and these deficits get harder to correct with age. With r