Tacit Global Agenda of All India School Education Surveys

Over the past 50 years, the All India Education Survey (AIES)—the first one was conducted in 1960 and the latest in 2009—has risen to strategic prominence in educational policy debates. Until the sixth survey it was known as the AIES and thereafter as the All India School Education Survey (AISES). Organised and sponsored by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), the AISES has become a key institution for ensuring the juggernaut that pigeonholes students, schools and nations having diverse cultures using the same standardised benchmarks. There are similar institutions functioning at the international level, the most prominent being the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). PISA is a triennial international survey which aims to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students from more than 70 nations. The OECD is an economic organisation with 34 members but PISA has assumed a new institutional role as arbitrator of global educational governance, simultaneously acting as diagnostician, judge and policy adviser to the world’s school system (Meyer and Benavot 2013: 10). The AISES follows along similar lines, thus bridging the gap caused by India’s non-membership in the OECD and non-participation in PISA (except in 2009).

From the first AIES undertaken in 1960 by the then Union Ministry of Education up to the eighth and latest AISES held in 2009, the changing objectives mark the structural changes in the nation’s vision of education. The report of the first educational survey held in 1960 states its objectives thus: