In Rural India, Teachers Often Fail to Show Up

Public School Students Left Waiting

UREJ, India -- Six days a week, if their parents can spare them from the fields, the children of this isolated village don tattered blue uniforms and trudge down a muddy path to the derelict concrete shell that serves as the government primary school. There is no furniture -- the children sit cross-legged on empty grain sacks -- to say nothing of latrines, electricity or drinking water. But that isn't the biggest obstacle to learning.

Often there are no teachers.

Although two government teachers have been assigned to the school, they turn up about three of every six workdays, and then for a few hours, according to villagers and two employees of a local nongovernmental group. The only authority figure present last Friday was an unpaid village teenager who shuttled gamely between the school's two rooms with 41 children under his care.

"Government teachers are like that," said Chaman Ganjhu, 22, an unlettered subsistence farmer whose 5-year-old daughter and 12-year-old sister are enrolled at the school. "It's bad, but what can we do?"

Many Indian parents are asking the same question. On any given day across the country, 24.5 percent of the teachers at government primary schools fail to turn up for their jobs, according to a study sponsored by the British government that was presented at an economic conference near New Delhi in January. In the eastern state of Jharkhand, one of India's poorest regions, the absentee rate was recorded at 42 percent, the highest in the country.

The phenomenon underscores the inequities of India's education system. On one hand, the government has been generous with institutions of higher learning, which have produced some of the world's most accomplished scientists and software engineers. But public grade schools, for the most part, are poorly equipped, understaffed and badly run; parents who can scrape together the fees typically send their children to India's burgeoning network of private schools, which educate an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the country's schoolchildren.

In 2002, Parliament passed a law that made education both compulsory and a fundamental right, but the measure said nothing about its quality.

"The fact that you write 'school' under a tree doesn't make it a school," said Sanjiv Kaura of the National Alliance for the Fundamental Right to Education, a New Delhi-based advocacy group. "They are trivializing the definition of a school."

Lack of Oversight

Some Jharkhand teachers have legitimate excuses for missing work: impossible roads, the threat of kidnapping by armed Maoist insurgents and the burden of extra duties unrelated to education, such as census-taking. But many collect their government salaries of between $170 and $220 per month -- generous by Indian standards -- without going to work for the simple reason that they can get away with it. As in other parts of India, teachers enjoy the protection of state lawmakers, who rely on the teachers' unions for votes, and often bribe local supervisors to look the other way when the teachers fail to turn up at school, according to education experts and some government officials.

"My problem is not how to bring the students to school," said Ashok Singh, the senior civil servant, or secretary, in the Jharkhand education ministry. "Today my biggest problem is how to bring the teachers to school."

Getting teachers to do their jobs is symptomatic of a bigger challenge confronting this nation of more than 1 billion people: The desperate need to improve the quality of governance, especially at the local level.

Notwithstanding India's economic successes in the last decade -- as epitomized by the boom in information technology services -- corruption, inefficiency and a lack of accountability still impede the delivery of basic services such as health care and education in the 600,000 rural villages where most Indians live, according to the World Bank and other development agencies.

Resentment over the poor quality of services under India's previous coalition government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, has been cited as a major reason for its recent election loss to an alliance led by India's secular Congress party.

As part of what he terms a "new deal" for India's impoverished masses, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pledged not only to increase development spending in rural areas but to improve the quality of governance, in part by strengthening the system of elected local councils known as panchayati raj.