Since the Congress-led UPA-II coalition government was voted back to power in Delhi with an unexpected larger majority a year ago, the most hyper-active ministry of government has been the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry. Within the past 12 months since he moved into Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi as HRD minister, former legal eagle Kapil Sibal has man-fully set about the task of cleansing the malodorous augean stables of Indian education with exemplary enthusiasm.

During the year past, Sibal has introduced a system of grading in CBSE affiliated schools; the no-child-left behind policies for classes I-VIII students and perhaps most important, piloted the long-pending Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) through Parliament. The RTE Act makes it obligatory for the State (Central, state and/or municipal governments) to provide free and compulsory education to children in the age group six-14. Moreover, the HRD ministry has simultaneously tabled four Bills in Parliament — the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill; Education Tribunal Bill; the National Commission for Higher Education and Research Bill and Prohibition of Unfair Practices in Technical Educational and Medical Educational Institutions Bill. Never in the history of post-independence India has an education or HRD minister been more active.

Yet it is pertinent to note that the RTE Act is focused on primary education and the clutch of Bills tabled for debate in the imminent monsoon session of Parliament are all related to reform and/or capacity expansion of tertiary education. Almost wholly forgotten in this melee of hyperactivity is the vital secondary school system which is emerging as the bottleneck crisis sector of Indian education.

Gradually India’s crisis-prone, perpetually fire-fighting educationists and academics are becoming aware that the country’s secondary education system is cracking under the pressure to absorb the increasing number of students streaming out of primary schools every year. With the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All) programme, initiated in 2001, having pushed the GER (gross enrolment ratio) in primary education to 98.4 percent, and retention and transition rates gradually improving, there’s rising panic within the establishment that the secondary education system doesn’t have the capacity to enrol the increasing inflow of new entrants.

Contemporary India hosts a mere 100,000 secondary (classes IX-X) and 50,000 senior secondary (classes XI-XII) schools with an aggregate enrolment of 40 million students (cf. 1.3 million primaries with 220 million students). In fact, 27 percent of India’s 626 districts have less than one secondary school for every 1,000 youth aged 14-18 years.

According to Secondary Education in India: Universalising Opportunity, a report released by the World Bank in October last year, between the decade 2007-2017 there will be additional demand for secondary education from 17 million students per year. Right now only 40 percent of India’s children in the age group 14-18 are enroled in secondary education. Moreover, secondary enrolment varies greatly in the 29 states of the Indian Union, ranging from 22 percent in Bihar to 92 percent in Kerala, from 4 percent in Jharkhand to 44 percent in Tamil Nadu.

The report also reveals that India’s GER of 40 percent in secondary education is far lower than the GERs of neighbouring East Asian countries (average 70 percent) and Latin America (82 percent). Even countries such as Vietnam (72 percent) and Bangladesh (52), with lower per capita income than India, have higher GERs in secondary education (see box).

“Compared with elementary and higher education, secondary education has not received the attention it deserves. It has remained the forgotten middle. Yet evidence from around the world suggests secondary education is critical to breaking the inter-generational transmission of poverty — it enables youth to break out of the poverty trap — and contributes to economic growth. The challenge for India is to dramatically improve access, equity and quality of secondary education simultaneously,” says Sam Carlson, the Delhi-based lead education specialist of the World Bank and task leader of Secondary Education in India.

The magnitude of the challenge confronting the Indian establishment in terms of enhancing capacity, improving quality and raising resources for investment in secondary education is formidable. According to the Delhi-based National Universityof Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), government (Centre plus state) spending on secondary education is currently about 1.2 percent of GDP (cf. 2.2 percent for elementary education) per year. To meet the Central government’s goal of providing a secondary school within 5-7 km of every habitation during the Eleventh Plan period (2007-12), India will have to double its annual expen-diture on this sector to an estimated Rs.147,950 crore.

“Secondary education in India needs urgent government attention and investment as it is the crucial link to the world of work, and prepares students for higher education. Right now secondary and higher secondary education is underdeveloped and neglected, and there is skewed development with very few secondaries accessible in rural India. The availability of school infrastructure — labs, libraries, classrooms, etc — in the rural hinterland also needs to be enhanced. While government has to invest resources to increase supply and access, simult-aneously the quality of education delivered in secondary schools also needs urgent improvement. Currently only 50 percent of students pass the class X exams of the country’s various examination boards and in class XII this percentage is further halved. Poor learning outcomes in secondary schools negatively impact quality in higher education, and consequently affect productivity in the workplace,” says Prof. R. Govinda, pro-tem vice chancellor and head of school education at NUEPA.

Fortunately, there seems to be some awareness within the incumbent and previous Congress-led UPA govern-ment at the Centre of the magnitude of the challenge confronting the nation in secondary education. In his Indepen-dence Day (August 15) speech in 2007, prime minister Manmohan Singh articulated the goal of universalising secondary education. “This is clearly the next step after universalising elementary education. While the goal is laudable, much work needs to be done before we are in a position to launch the scheme for universalisation of access to secondary education. We must not underestimate the complexity of this task as the principles for universalising elementary education cannot be easily transferred to secondary education. The physical, financial, pedagogical and human resource needs are quite different. We also need to recognise the role currently being played by the private sector and policy design must factor this in. Detailed strategies and plans would need to be worked out rapidly for each state. Special attention would need to be paid to districts with SC/ST/OBC/minority concentration,” said Dr. Singh who also announced the setting up of 6,000 model schools (with an estimated outlay of Rs.45,000 crore) across the country.

Twenty months later in January 2009, this statement of intent of the prime minister assumed shape and form with the announcement of the Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA, or National Secondary Education Campaign) — a Central government sponsored scheme “to universalise access to and improve quality of secondary education”. The main objectives of the scheme are “to achieve a GER of 75 percent for classes IX-X within the next five years by providing a secondary school within 5-7 km of every habitation; improve quality of education by making all secondary schools conform to prescribed norms; remove gender, socio-economic and disability barriers; and achieve universal access to secondary education by 2017”.

Following the return of the Congress-led UPA government to power in New Delhi after the general election of May 2009 and the induction of Kapil Sibal into the HRD ministry, the RMSA programme has been reinforced. Through a gazette notification dated June 26, 2009 the Central government announced the setting up of a National Mission on RMSA headed by the HRD minister to facilitate and supervise implementation of the scheme. “After elementary education, the government aims to make secondary education a right of every child in the country in the next five years. Hopefully by 2013 or 2015, we should make free and compulsory education a right at the secondary stage also,” Sibal said after the RTE Act came into force on April 1.

RMSA’s broad physical targets include creating capacity for enrolment of an additional 3.2 million students in 2011-12 by increasing the annual intake of 44,000 existing government secondary schools, inaugurating 11,188 new secondaries, appointing 1.79 lakh additional teachers and constructing 80,500 new classrooms. In the Eleventh Plan (2007-12), a provision of Rs.20,120 crore has been made for realising the objectives of RMSA within the next two years with the Planning Commission decreeing that the Central government will bear 75 percent of the required capital expenditure and the state governments will contribute 25 percent. According to HRD ministry estimates, a sum of Rs.90,485 crore is required over the next ten years to fund the universalisation of secondary education initiative.

While ex facie the Plan provision and outlays mandated by the Planning Commission and HRD ministry seem impressive, given rising costs of land, construction and teachers’ salaries, they are hopelessly inadequate. For instance assuming that a modest Rs.5 crore outlay is required for constructing a secondary school, during the next two years, a sum of Rs.55,940 crore is required to build the 11,188 new secondaries envisaged by the RMSA programme, of which the Central government whose entire outlay for education in fiscal 2010-11 is Rs.42,036 crore, has to fund 75 percent. And it’s pertinent to note that in the current year the projected fiscal deficit of the Union government is Rs.381,408 crore. Moreover, the fiscal situation of the state governments which are expected to contribute 25 percent of the outlay required to implement RMSA, is even worse.

Well aware of the precarious financial situation of New Delhi, and of the reality that investment in education is not the top priority of the cash-strapped Central govern-ment (in the Union Budget 2010-11, a mere Rs.1,700 crore was allocated to RMSA), Sibal has initiated dialogue with international development agencies to cobble up a modest corpus for a National Innovation Fund for Secondary Education (NIFSE). The World Bank, DFID and the European Union have agreed to contri-bute $150 million (Rs.705 crore) to help set up the fund.

“The fund’s overall objective is to support innovative ideas and approaches that contribute to RMSA’s overarching goal of providing universal access to quality secondary education. The fund will, therefore, provide grants to states, schools or groups of schools to support activities that help increase access, equity, quality, and improve management at the secondary education level,” S.C. Khuntia, joint secretary, Union HRD ministry, wrote in a letter dated May 3, addressed to education secretaries of all states.

Yet it’s important to bear in mind that until RMSA was launched in 2009, the Central and state governments’ presence in the secondary education sector had been less than large. In sharp contrast with government involvement in elementary (i.e primary and upper primary) education which has resulted in over 90 percent of the 1.3 million primary schools across India being (state and local) government-owned and administered, the secondary education system in India has been largely driven by the private sector. According to Secondary Education in India, of the estimated 150,000 secondary and senior secondary schools in the country, 60 percent are private — 30 percent private aided and 30 percent private independent respectively. In fact over the past 15 years, the proportion of government secondary schools has declined slightly from 45 to 40 percent. In some states of the Union such as Kerala, Mahara-shtra, Assam, West Bengal and Gujarat, more than 50 percent of secondary enrolment is in private aided schools. Moreover between 1993 and 2002, 72 percent of the total increase in secondary school enrolment in urban areas was in private independent schools.

While the role of the private sector in stepping in to create capacity in secondary education must be acknowledged and any new government policy must strengthen and facilitate private participation and investment, the decline in the number of government secondaries has hit the poor hard. The poorest 30-40 percent of households are unable to pay even the modest tuition fees demanded by private aided schools. Secondary Education in India reveals that wealthier children are more than twice as likely to be enroled in secondary education as poor children, and that secondary attendance of the general population is 80 percent higher than of children from scheduled tribes and castes and Muslim households.

“In 2005 students from the highest quintile (income group) attended secondary school at more than twice the rate of students from the lowest quin-tile. While this inequity has decreased slightly over time since 1995-96 as elementary education has expanded for poor children, the anticipated large increases in the number of grade VIII graduates from poor, rural areas over the next seven-eight years who will be unable to afford private secondary schooling mean that inequity is poised to increase if nothing is done to change current policies,” says the report.

Dr. A.S. Seetharamu, former professor of education at the Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore and education advisor to the Karnataka state government, believes that capacity must expand simultaneously in private and public secondary schools to ensure equity and access in rural areas, and for socio-economically disadvantaged groups. “Although the Central and particularly state govern-ments must encourage private entrepreneurs to promote green-field secondary schools, they must also increase their own investment in the sector to levels of the industrial economies which guarantee children a minimum 12 years of schooling. Public invest-ment in secondary education is crucial as it’s a feeder of the services sector and industry, which contribute 70 percent of the country’s GDP. Currently a large number of children — almost 35 percent — drop out of education after class VIII because they are unable to access secondary schooling. For children of lower income and disadvantaged groups and rural children, the Central and state governments must step up and create a high-quality subsidised public secondary school system. Moreover they should also introduce vocational skills and training to enable students to join the workforce after completion of secondary school,” says Seetharamu.

But the plain reality is that the Central and state governments with their massive budget deficits are ill-equipped to build secondary and higher secondary schools on a meaningful scale. Therefore, public-private partner-ships (PPPs) are being increasingly proposed to attain the objectives of capacity creation and inclusion. Albeit belatedly, educrats of the Union HRD ministry seem to have realised that government can’t go it alone and PPPs are not synonymous with privatisation.

According to sources within the ministry, it is actively considering various models of PPPs where government retains the regulatory, financing and quality assurance roles while contracting with private sector edupreneurs to build and maintain public secondary schools, provide non-educational services, curricula and educational materials, and teaching and non-teaching services in public schools. Another PPP model under consideration is for private schools to admit publicly-funded students (voucher system). In the RTE Act 2009, the Central government has already set the ball rolling for a nationwide PPP with private schools. S. 12 of the Act provides for government reimbursement of tuition expenses of 25 percent publicly-funded poor neigh-bourhood children in class I of private schools, with effect from the next academic year (2011).

“Innovative PPPs are required to achieve the goal of universal secondary education. There’s a wealth of expertise within the private and NGO sectors which needs to be availed by govern-ment to build a high quality national secondary education system. Various models of PPPs can be negotiated with the private sector to help in teacher training, curriculum development and school management. However govern-ment must build-in a system of full accountability and thoroughly vet private partners, while ensuring instit-utional autonomy and longevity of partnerships. Unfortunately though there is a lot of government rhetoric on PPPs, in reality the process of negot-iating with them is slow and cumbersome. We have held discussions on this issue with several education secretaries of the stategovernment, but they haven’t led anywhere. To build successful PPPs and provide universal access to secondary education, what’s most required is political will,” says Shukla Bose, founder-director of the Bangalore-based Parikrma Humanity Foundation (estb. 2003) which runs four high-quality, free-of-charge CISCE-affiliated English medium class I-X schools in Bangalore, with an aggregate enrolment of 1,116 slum and underprivileged children.

Though tapping into private and NGO resources will speed up and give momentum to the secondary education for all initiative, urgent reform of the rigid secondary school system is also required to widen partici-pation and improve completion percentages. Currently secon-dary education is available only in regular schools with students having to clear either the CBSE or CISCE, or state board sudden- death examinations. There is little flexibility for students to exit and re-enter the K-12 system. Unfortunately the National Institute for Open Schooling (NIOS), the apex body for liberal schooling which offers distance learning secondary school certification, is not very popular with the students’ community because of its perceived second class status. Therefore any government strategy on improving inclusion in secondary education must strengthen the open schooling system and encourage flexible distance educ-ation using contemporary information and communication technologies (ICT) to enable young people who have dropped out, to re-enter secondary education.

“To address the challenge of universalising secondary education, government must strengthen and expand the NIOS system. The conventional secondary education system must also be made more flexible with students given options to focus on groups of subjects and specific courses and receive certification. A collection of certificates could be treated as completion of secondary schooling. Moreover, today it’s not necessary to construct large capital-intensive conventional schools. Over the next three-five years, internet connectivity and availability of low-cost computers will open up new teaching-learning possibilities. We need to move away from the current rigid model to a more flexible model of secondary education. There are many ways to do this. For instance a model similar to the modular vocational courses delivered by the ministry of labour could be formulated; IGNOU’s community colleges can be multiplied and the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya network of rural boarding schools expanded. The need is for numerous initiatives without mono-polies,” says Madhav Chavan, the Mumbai-based promoter-chief exec-utive of education NGO Pratham (estb.1994) which runs after-school programmes for 500,000 children in 43 cities across the country, and publishes its Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) which measures learning outcomes in rural primaries.

Yet apart from bridging the demand-supply gap in secondary education by introducing flexibility in the delivery and assessment systems, the other major challenge is improving quality and student learning outcomes. Currently, only 64 percent of all students who write the class X exam of the various exam boards countrywide graduate. However, bearing in mind that the pass percentage is a mere 33 percent, the average level of student achievement is very low.

Now with s.16 of the RTE Act, 2009 mandating that no child can be held back or expelled for academic under-performance until class VIII, there’s apprehension that huge numbers of under-prepared students will flood the secondary school system. “Automatic promotion of students until class VIII is certain to dilute quality and learning standards in secondary education. The no-detention policy works only when learning outcomes for every grade are well defined and there is complete teacher and school accountability. The RTE Act has abolished exams until class VIII and doesn’t prescribe minimum learning outcomes. This is a nightmarish scenario in which all children are deemed to be qualified to enter secondary school. We will have a generation of low achievers whose admission into class IX is mandatory. It will be a big challenge for secondary school teachers to prepare a huge mass of under-prepared students to write the class X boards,” warns Mallika Mani, director of Srikriti, The Teacher Education Centre, Chennai.

Central to improving student learning outcomes at the elementary and secondary stages are high-quality and well-trained teachers — the Achilles heel of Indian education. In a recent report the Union HRD ministryadmitted that “teacher recruitment is the biggest challenge before the department of school education”. For effective implementation of the RTE Act, which mandates a teacher-student ratio of 1:30, an additional 700,000 new teachers need to be hired right away. Moreover, the planned expansion of secondary education will require recruitment and training of an estimated 500,000 new secondary teachers.

Recruiting and training 500,000 secondary teachers is especially challe-nging because secondary schooling requires higher qualifications and specialist subject teachers. Sadly the country’s 8,000 teacher training colleges which are notorious for their obsolete syllabuses and pedagogies are ill-equipped to meet this challenge, and need a major overhaul. Add to this the problem of lack of teacher accountability and motivation — an estimated 25 percent government school teachers are absent every day.

“To provide meaningful primary and secondary education, teachers must be trained to use new technologies and pedagogies. Governments can’t legis-late teacher effort and effectiveness. Therefore teacher training reform must be initiated on a massive scale to train a new generation of teachers equipped with contemporary ICT and pedagogical skills. Quality in secondary education hinges on the ability of our teacher training colleges to train more than 1 million new teachers within the next five years and simultaneously reinforce the skills of in-service teachers,” adds Mani.

Inevitably, low achievement levels and poor completion percentages in secondary education impact enrolment and quality in higher education. Currently a mere 11 percent of youth in the 18-24 age group is enroled in higher education. Moreover abysmal learning outcomes in a majority of India’s 431 universities and 23,000 colleges have created the phenomenon of “unemployable graduates”. According to a 2005 Nasscom-Mckinsey World Institute study, 75 percent of contemporary India’s engineering and 85 percent of science, arts and commerce college graduates are “unemployable”. Little wonder that Indian industry is constrained by a severe and accentuating shortage of skilled manpower.

Given the vital role of secondary education in preparing students for higher education, the quality of which determines economic development, massive resources need to be mobilised for capacity creation, infrastructure and teacher training in this sector. Moreover if the benefits of the substantial government investment made over the past decade in elementary education and the Sarva Shiskha Abhiyan are to be realised, the secondary education system has to expand, quantitatively and qualitatively — and quickly. Though a start in this direction has been made with the Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan initiative, Kapil Sibal has to ensure that investment follows the rhetoric by arguing forcefully for a substantially greater share of Central government tax revenue for the huge mass of India’s 450 million children. The Rs.90,485 crore budgeted by the Union HRD ministry to universalise secondary education over the next ten years is grossly inadequate — a mere Rs.9,048 crore per year — and too small a  price to pay for creating an educated and skilled workforce.

The HRD ministry, government — and indeed Indian society — would do well to ponder the sombre warning of the Secondary Education in India report: “Secondary education can be a bridge or a bottleneck between elementary and higher education; public policy has an interest in ensuring it is the former, not the latter.”

That’s advice which needs to be heeded for the greater good of the world’s largest — and most neglected — child population.

With Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai);  Anupama Patil (Mumbai) & Autar Nehru (Delhi)