Beyond corporate social responsibility: a role for corporate India in rural primary education

Abstract

With the bulk of India’s population residing in rural areas, access to quality primary education in non-urban areas is vital to unlock the country’s vast economic potential. Good primary education is likely to provide a solid foundation to the rural poor for acquiring higher education, professional skills and employment, thereby reducing poverty for them and enabling sustained economic growth for the country. Government schools, which comprise the majority of schools in rural India, have been unable to address the challenge due to inferior facilities, ineffective teaching and mismanagement. As a result, rural parents, who can afford to do so, are increasingly enrolling their children in private schools that have been opportunistically set up in relatively affluent rural areas. While such schools demonstrate better results than government schools, they are far from adequate in terms of quality and accessibility. We believe that there is a need to meet the twin challenges of quality and accessibility with more innovative methods which involve more than the traditional providers of education.