Primary Education

This paper presents the results of a field study of public schools in Betul and Dewas districts of Madhya Pradesh. The study aims to document the functioning of public schools, whether created by the Education Guarantee Scheme or not and to understand the consequences of the reforms on the links between education and rural society and on the development of private schools. While the results may not be representative of all of rural Madhya Pradesh, they provide an accurate picture of the situation in two areas atypical of the settings targeted by EGS, viz, adivasi villages and dalit hamlets.

The Maharashtra government's decision to institute a new public examination at the end of the fourth year of primary education, which will be compulsory for students of all government-aided schools, cannot be expected to make any difference to the admittedly deplorable standards of primary education in the state when the government has no plans to meet the woeful shortages of trained teachers and essential school facilities.

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This article, based on a desk review of the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) and qualitative micro studies in six states - Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Tamil Nadu - attempts to capture the impact of primary education programmes on the ground. Introducing the emergent concept of 'hierarchies of access' to describe the new segregation occurring in primary education, the article focuses on the micro studies documenting the tangible and intangible dimensions of gender and social equity that frame the implementation of DPEP at the village and panchayat level. On the basis of the findings of the desk review and the micro studies, the authors discuss ways to reverse the trend of segregation so as to make universal primary education a substantive reality.