The primary school in Koday Dih (Giridih district, Jharkhand) has 78 pupils but only one teacher, who is actually a para-teacher with rudimentary training. He manages this situation by dividing the children between the school’s two classrooms and shuttling between the two. When he is busy with administrative duties, which take a lot of his time, the children just mill around. When he is absent, the school is like a ship without rudder.
There is nothing special about Koday Dih – it is just one of Jharkhand’s numerous single-teacher schools. In the state as a whole, the proportion of single-teacher schools at the primary level is close to one-third, according to the Unified District Information System for Education. (Here and elsewhere, we are actually referring to government primary schools.)
The recent Gloom in the Classroom report sheds further light on the situation in Jharkhand based on a survey of 138 randomly-selected primary and upper-primary schools in 16 districts. About one third of the primary schools in the sample had a single teacher – generally a male para-teacher. The single-teacher primary schools had 51 pupils on average. Most of the pupils were Dalit and Adivasi children. These children, who bear the burden of centuries of exclusion from formal education and need the best schooling facilities today, are getting the worst.
This situation passes largely unnoticed, in spite of UDISE data being conveniently available on the net. We were surprised ourselves when we looked at the figures (Table 1). How come the proportion of single-teacher schools in India is still as high as 15 per cent, fourteen years after the Right to Education Act came into force? The Act clearly states that every school must have at least two teachers.
Table 1 | The table lists single-teacher schools at the primary level (Major States, 2021-22)
The figures pertain to government primary schools
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Jharkhand is one of the worst offenders, but quite a few states have a similar if not higher proportion of single-teacher schools, including Andhra Pradesh (34%), Telangana (30%) and
Karnataka (29%). In 9 of India’s 21 major states, the proportion of children studying in single-teacher schools is well above 10%, rising to 25% in Jharkhand.
In some states, single-teacher schools have something to do with low population density, scattered settlement patterns and low fertility rates. One example is Himachal Pradesh, where the proportion of single-teacher schools is also high (27%), but the average number of children in these schools is below 20. In Kerala, single-teacher schools seem to be a second-best arrangement for tiny habitations, judging from the fact that they have just 10 pupils on average. The proportion of single-teacher schools there is also very low (4%), so that the proportion of children studying in single-teacher schools is below one per cent - the lowest among major states.
In many states, however, there are plenty of single-teacher schools with a large number of children. On average, single-teacher schools have 39 pupils in Madhya Pradesh, 46 in Jharkhand, 70 in Uttar Pradesh and a whopping 96 in Bihar! Only 9 of India’s 21 major states have an average pupil-teacher ratio below 30 in single-teacher schools. In short, the persistence of single-teacher schools is a serious problem across the country, and affects a very substantial proportion of children in many states.
These figures also make it clear that the issue of single-teacher schools is not at all the same as that of “mini-schools”, i.e. schools with a very low number of pupils. Before the Right to Education Act, setting up a mini-school was a simple way of extending school education to tiny habitations. After the Act came into force, this option became harder to sustain because of the new norms. Some states have tried to deal with this by merging mini-schools with other schools – “rationalization” of schools as the National Education Policy calls it. In tiny habitations, there is a genuine tension between school accessibility and functionality, and this problem has no simple solution. The viability of mini-schools is an important issue in its own right, but the persistence of single-teacher schools is a much larger problem – most of them are not mini-schools at all.
Perhaps the Right to Education Act made it a little harder to avoid single-teacher schools because it requires the presence of a primary school within one kilometre of every habitation. But 14 years is more than enough time to get over this hurdle. The rule that every school should have at least two teachers is perfectly reasonable. Quite likely, the main reason why it has been blatantly violated is that state governments find it convenient to save money by under-staffing schools in underprivileged areas and know that they can get away with it. Teacher aversion to remote postings exacerbates the problem.
Last month, an agitation against the proliferation of single-teacher schools took place in Garu block of Latehar district (Jharkhand). This event brought to light a critical fact that had already emerged there during the Covid-19 crisis: there is a huge unarticulated demand for quality education in rural India. Few parents in Garu had ever thought of agitating against single-teacher schools or related deficiencies of the schooling system. But when a local organisation took the initiative, people joined in large numbers, taking a day off at the peak of the mahua collection season and travelling long distances at some cost.
Twenty years ago, there was a vibrant movement for the right to education across the country. Paradoxically, the movement seems to have lost steam soon after the Right to Education Act saw the light of day. Perhaps the time has come for a second wave.
Rikesh Choudhary is a researcher at IIT Delhi; Jean Drèze is Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University; Reetika Khera is Professor of Economics at IIT Delhi
Source: Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE)
Also read: Inside Jharkhand’s single-teacher schools
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