Common service centres in India through pilot initiative: Strengthening rural education through tele-education in India

Abstract

The first phase of the present work analyses the quality of education being imparted in rural Bangalore through public and private schools. It compares and contrasts the two types of schools by conducting surveys and interviews with students, teachers and parents from sixteen schools, all randomly selected. The competitive advantage of private schools over public schools has been clearly brought out by the information collected. This explains the reason why there is a growing trend in the number of private schools over public schools in rural Karnataka. The attrition rates observed in the public schools has been growing for the same reason. At the same time, the number of registrations in private schools has been constantly rising over the years. The interviews have focused on understanding which factors are majorly responsible for the poor performance and hence perception of the public schools in the minds of the parents. The results point out that the main reasons for students dropping out of schools include the location of the school, economic inability of parents to afford education fees, gender bias, social disadvantage of backward classes, uneducated family background, ill-health and the poor quality of education being imparted. The economic indicators for enrolment and retention at these schools include per capita income of the parents, land owning patterns of the family, occupation, adult women work force participation and parental motivation for educating the male child. To add to all these factors, the poor infrastructure provided by the public schools coupled with unfriendly attitude of the teachers leads to poor quality education. The teacher-student ratio in these schools is very low and multi-grade teaching does not help a lot. There is a great scope of public private partnership in education which would benefit the state and hence, the country, specifically by raising the education levels in rural India. Tele-education has come up as a new initiative which, if leveraged can assist the education imparting process in rural Karnataka in a costeffective manner. The second phase of the work involves understanding the process of providing tele-education in Tumkur area of Bangalore. This is followed by a critical analysis of the ways in which the process can be improved to incentivize the parents to send their children for tele-education lectures. Providing tele-education is an initiative with a double benefit- first, improving the quality of education in rural areas and second, making the common service centers (already running in Tumkur) profitable. If the pilot initiative is found successful, it is desired to take the program on a national level. However, there are inherent constraints in being able to launch tele-education at a nationwide scale. These are analyzed and possible solutions have been provided. Finally, recommendations have been provided for the successful implementation of tele-education working in parallel with the traditional schooling in a cost-effective manner towards a better educated nation.