India in Numbers: The Case of Falling Figures in Primary and Secondary Education Enrollment

India in Numbers: The Case of Falling Figures in Primary and Secondary Education Enrollment

Swaniti Initiative | September 5, 2014 | The Swaniti Blog

Date of Release: September 5th, 2014

Published in: Indian Express

In part-2 of our fortnightly data series, India In Numbers, we take a look at the Gross Enrollment Ratio in Primary, Middle, Secondary & Senior Secondary, Higher Education from 2001 to 2010 by state and political party in power.

Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) is the ratio of students enrolled of all age groups. States, as seen below, were ranked based on their average GER in Primary and Sr Secondary.

The colour coding of the states are as follows: Yellow signifies Good at Primary, Bad at Sr. Secondary; Orange signifies Bad at Primary, Good at Sr. Secondary; Green signifies Good at both Primary and Sr Secondary; Purple signifies Bad at both Primary and Sr Secondary.

The worrying trend is that there is an imbalance between GER at Primary and GER at Sr Secondary.

At least 10 states are doing well in Primary-level education, but they are falling behind in Higher-level education.

Same goes for states doing surprising well in Secondary-level education with lowPrimary-level education numbers.

Jigyasa has rated each state by considering the individual GERs of Primary, Middle, Secondary and Senior Secondary, and Higher education with the following weightage:

Here is a combined map of party-wise and state-wise analysis based on the average rating derived by using the above weightage

View Party wise analysis in a full screen map

Delhi, under the leadership of INC, is the only state that has excelled in providing primary and secondary education.

Eastern Indian States are a hub of poor academic performances: Bihar (under JDU+BJP), West Bengal (under CPI(M)), Assam (under INC) and Nagaland (under Nagaland People’s front) have poor primary and secondary education.

Almost half of all Indian States have either poor primary or secondary education programs and there is no consistent party program that is led by NDA or UPA.