India, Sustainable Development Goals & Education

This case study presents insights on one of the key challenges of development – education. Quality Education is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In fact, SDG 4 aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, build and upgrade education facilities that are child, disability and gender sensitive and provide safe, nonviolent, inclusive and effective learning environments for all. This is more important in the Indian context, where the population of youth in the working age is high and still increasing. Nearly 67% of the population in the country in 2018 was between the ages of 15 and 64. Commonly known as the “demographic dividend”, the bulge in the number of youth in the country can be a force for positive change. The population of youth is predicted to be 464 million in 2021, which will eventually decline to 458 million by 2026 (UN Habitat, 2013).  However, a majority of the current population is considered as “unskilled”. As per Economic Survey (2015), only about 2% of India’s workforce is skilled. This number contrasts poorly with smaller countries like South Korea and Japan that report figures of 96 and 80 per cent respectively. Hence, equipping India’s youth with education and skills is a high priority item for the country’s development.

The Government of India has made attempts to increase participation in education. Initiatives such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Universal Education Campaign) have proven to be effective in ensuring near universal enrolment in primary schools (Economic Survey, 2014). However, the enrolment ratios fall in higher levels. In fact, according to a UNESCO (2016) report, 37 million students drop out of school in India by the time they reached 10th standard.

In addition to challenges to enrolment, the quality of education imparted in schools is also an area of concern. Anecdotal evidence suggests that with outdated syllabi, a focus on rote learning and a shortage of quality faculty, schools as well as tertiary institutions are unable to cope with the challenges of educating young India. Surveys by PISA and ASER have thrown light on the low level of learning in schools. ASER’s 2014 survey found that almost a quarter of Class V students were unable to read a Class II level text, while PISA’s 2009 assessment of students in Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh ranked them at the bottom of the 74 regions they had measured.

Technology and Education

There has been a global push for enhanced use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the education system, with international organisations such as the World Bank advocating the increased adoption of technology in school systems in developing countries. A survey of ICT technologies in India and South Asia carried out by the World Bank’s InfoDev program (2010) highlighted how ICT plays an important part in the education system.  The first is the role played by ICT in the development process. Through technology, education can be made more accessible, and be used to provide better infrastructure and teaching to a larger number of students.  In addition, ICT and e-learning enable the imparting of knowledge and skills at a faster pace, to allow students to keep up with the “knowledge economy”. Enhanced learning through new technologies can serve to create better environments for learning and encourage innovation. The process of setting up e-learning ecosystems in schools also helps build skills and capacity in teachers, trainers and school administration.

Global Initiatives

In keeping with the emphasis on technology in education, governments around the world have introduced ICT in their education systems in various forms.  Studies on the effectiveness of these programs are nascent, and the evidence on their impact is mixed.

Brazil and Peru, for instance, launched a program to sponsor laptops for school-going children. While studies on this program did not find evidence of effects on enrolment and test scores in Math and Language, some positive effects were observed. Students with laptops had higher general cognitive skills, which were measured through techniques such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a verbal fluency test and a Coding test (Cristia et al.,2017). 

Another program in Lagos, Nigeria, experimented with the introduction of e-Readers in schools. It was found that 6 to 8 months of exposure to e-Readers had a positive impact on learning. However, this impact only occurred if the devices had curriculum material, and complemented the teaching from textbooks. Purely recreational use of the e-Readers did not have any impact on learning outcomes (Habyarimana, Sabarwal ,2018).  Mo et al (2016) evaluated the use of computers as tutors in China, and found that the impact was positive only if there was careful implementation and well integrated with the existing curriculum.

In India, Muralidharan, Ganimian, Singh (2019) studied the impact of a project that provided personalised technology-aided after-school instruction to students in schools. They found that attending the program improved scores in Hindi and Maths. They also observed that the gains were greater for academically weaker students.