In Rural India, Teachers Often Fail to Show Up

To that end, the government has proposed channeling money for education and other purposes directly to the councils, bypassing state governments and increasing local control and accountability. Some development and education experts would go a step further, endowing local elected bodies with the power to hire and fire teachers in their districts. Teachers would presumably be more diligent about turning up for work if they knew their jobs were on the line.

"I do think if there's greater local control and village residents are given a voice, this teacher absenteeism will come to an end," said Singh, the education secretary and a self-described reformer who studied at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in the early 1990s. Teachers will be "scared of the local committee," he said.

That prospect is some way off in Jharkhand, where the panchayati raj system is essentially defunct because of legal and political disputes that have prevented local elections for two decades. Almost half of the state's residents cannot read and 30 percent of children between the ages of 6 and 14 do not attend school, according to government statistics.

A Dim 'Light of Education'

A visit to this tiny village helps explain why. Surrounded by jungle-covered hills about 620 miles southeast of New Delhi, Urej is home to about 40 families, most of them from indigenous groups. Villagers make their homes in mud-walled huts, fetch water from a communal pump and eke out a living from small plots of corn and rice that, in the absence of any irrigation system, depend on the annual monsoon.

Access is along a stony dirt track, too rugged even for four-wheel drive. A foreign visitor arrived last Friday on the back of a motorcycle driven by Motilal Ganjhu, a primary school headmaster in the town of Uri Mari, about 16 miles away. Ganjhu is also the coordinator for a cluster of government schools in the area.

Before leaving Uri Mari, Ganjhu, who wore a beige baseball cap with the word "Attitude" stitched across the front, had confidently predicted that the teachers would be at their jobs -- "today is a working day" -- opposing a claim by the head of a local nongovernmental group. Arriving at the school after a bone-jarring 45-minute journey, Ganjhu, 42, said he was dismayed to find that he had been wrong.

"The objective I have to bring the light of education to every village is not visible, so I am surprised," he said.

In the teachers' absence, the students were supervised by Akash Kumar, a shy, slender 18-year-old who said he was filling in for his wife, who is assigned to the school as a kind of teacher's aide. Kumar said his wife had been absent for a week due to illness. He also said she has not received her monthly salary of 1,000 rupees, about $20, in two years.

"The officials give us hope that the salary will come, so one day we hope we will get it," he said wistfully.

Random Attendance

Chaman Ganjhu, the subsistence farmer whose daughter and sister attend the school and who is unrelated to the school coordinator, said the regular teachers normally "come two or three days in a week." His claim was supported by Kishore Kumar, 21, and Sonu Munda, 22, both of whom work at the school on behalf of the local nongovernmental group, which is affiliated with the Delhi-based education alliance. They, too, were absent last Friday.

"It's random," Kumar said of the teachers' schedule. "On Monday they came at 12:30 and left at 2:30." School hours run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Later that afternoon in the village of Barkagaon, about 12 miles away, one of the teachers, Ashok Kumar, disputed those accounts, asserting that he normally puts in a full day. But Kumar, 37, said he decided last Friday morning to take the day off because he was late in getting to his parents' house, where he keeps the motorcycle he uses to get to Urej. He said he was delayed by a political protest that disrupted travel on area roads.

As a consequence, he said, he decided to spend the day working at his poultry business in Barkagaon. "I enjoy the job of a teacher," said Kumar, who was hired last fall and also owns a small bus company. "It's also like a prestige thing, that a person is employed in a government job."

Kumar's colleague, Jubbhar Shaw, the school's headmaster, spent the day at his home several miles outside of Barkagaon, where he was repairing the wooden gate outside his front yard. Shaw, 54, contradicted Kumar's account, saying that Kumar told him the day before that he would not be going to work. He said he had no choice but to follow suit because he does not own a motorcycle and relies on Kumar to give him a ride.

"There is no such issue" of absenteeism, said Shaw. "I go there regularly."

Nand Kishore Lal, the government functionary in Barkagaon who is responsible for seeing education and other social services in the area, questioned the teachers' excuses.

"There was a protest but some people tend to take advantage of it; if something is going wrong, then let's enjoy it," said Lal.

In Urej, villagers were philosophical about the absence of the two teachers, who were assigned here last year after a long period in which the school had no teachers. Under the circumstances, said Kabilas Devi Mosmaid, the widowed mother of Chaman Ganjhu, the subsistence farmer, she is pleased that her 12-year-old daughter and several grandchildren are getting any education.

"When she gets married she'll be able to write a letter to me here," she said of her daughter. "I will ask my granddaughters to read what message is there."