Indian Economy, 5th edition (102 page)

2. Things India Have

The apprenticeship programmes in India are governed by The Apprentice Act 1961 and the Apprenticeship Rules 1992. The organisational structure and rules and regulations overseeing it are complex and burdensome. The Ministry of Labour and Employment oversees ‘trade apprentices’ through six regional offices. The Ministry of Human Resource Development oversees ‘graduate, technician, and technician (vocational) apprentices’ through four boards located in different cities. There are strict norms on permissions, trades permitted, training duration, stipend levels, apprentice/employee ratio, and training facilities. It is onerous to create new apprenticeship positions, and there are several vacancies even in positions that have already been created. As a consequence, India only has under 3,00,000 formal apprentices.

To ensure that comparier do not hire cheap labour in guise of an apprenticeship programme, the regulatory norms were kept tighter. The need of the time is to develop set of provisions streamlining regulation and incentivise corporates, while protecting the interest and well-being of apprentices.

3. Making it Work

The present rules and regulations overseeing apprenticeships need to be changed such that employers and prospective apprentices can choose each other freely by just requiring information on what will be learnt on the job and a minimum wage. Some recommendations including those from the 2009
Planning Commission
taskforce are described below:

i.
Simpler Regulation:
A single window mechanism is needed to clear company applications for pan-India apprenticeship programmes. Currently, companies need to approach each state apprenticeship adviser separately. Partnerships between companies and industry federations should be facilitated by giving timely permissions.

ii.
Wider Reach:
Presently apprentices are only allowed in specified trades. Majority of graduates are not currently covered under ‘Formal Apprenticeships’. In addition, the procedure to include new trades especially services, which are largely excluded, is complex and can take many months. A fully deregulated list is needed for apprenticeships to remain dynamic and in line with the changing needs of the workplace.

iii.
Flexibility to Companies:
At present many schemes are required to be unnecessarily long (up to four years), and have rigid requirements on ‘worker to apprentice ratio’. Moreover, the penal provisions for companies, even for small violations of the rules, are very severe. Certain relaxation of rules can help give flexibility to companies. For example, the duration of apprenticeship training can be allowed to vary across trades and companies. Short-duration programmes (less than 12 months) can be freed from much of the oversight provided they pay minimum wages. Relaxing the rigid requirements on the ratio of apprentices to workers could also accelerate capacity creation.

iv.
Dual System of Training:
Partnerships between companies and educational institutions should be encouraged. Like the ‘German model’, corporates can be allowed to outsource theoretical training, and educational institutions can be allowed to outsource practical training.

v.
Active Exchanges:
There should be active exchanges and portals, matching prospective apprentices to employers.

WAY TO EVIDENCE-BASED
BETTER POLICY

Educational investments contribute to aggregate economic growth. More than this, they enable citizens to broadly participate in the growth process through improved productivity, employment, and wages, and are therefore a critical component of the ‘inclusive growth’ agenda of the Government of India. The past decade has seen substantial increases in education investments under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), and this additional spending has led to considerable progress in improving primary school access, infrastructure, pupil-teacher ratios, teacher salaries, and student enrollment. Nevertheless, student learning levels and trajectories are disturbingly low, with nationally representative studies showing that over 60 per cent of children aged 6-14 are unable to read at second-grade level. Further, these figures have shown no sign of improving over time (and may even be deteriorating).
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The decade also saw a number of high-quality empirical studies on the causes and correlates of better learning outcomes based on large samples of data and careful attention paid to identification of causal relationships. This research has identified interventions/inputs that do not appear to contribute meaningfully to improved education outcomes, as well as interventions that are highly effective. In particular, the research over the past decade suggests that increasing inputs to primary education in a ‘business-as-usual’ way is unlikely to improve student learning meaningfully unless accompanied by significant changes in pedagogy and/or improvements in school governance. It is, therefore, imperative that
education policy shifts
its emphasis from simply providing more school inputs in a ‘business-as-usual’ way and focuses on improving ‘education outcomes’.

School Inputs

Both administrative and survey data show considerable improvements in most input-based measures of schooling quality. But there is very little impact of these improvements in school facilities on learning outcomes. This is not to suggest that school infrastructure does not matter for improving learning outcomes (they may be necessary but not sufficient), but the results highlight that infrastructure by itself is unlikely to have a significant impact on improving learning levels and trajectories. Similarly, while there may be good social and humanitarian reasons for ‘mid-day meal’ programmes (including nutrition and child welfare), there is no evidence to suggest that they improve learning outcomes. Even more striking is the fact that no credible study on education in India has found any significant positive relationship between teachers possessing formal teacher training credentials and their effectiveness for improving student learning.

In the same way, there is no correlation between teacher salary and its effectiveness for improving student learning, and at best there are very modest positive effects of reducing pupil-teacher ratios on learning outcomes. As discussed further, these very stark findings most likely reflect
weaknesses in pedagogy
and
governance
which are key barriers in translating increased spending into better outcomes.

The results summarised so far can be quite discouraging. Fortunately, the news is not all bad, because the evidence of the past decade also points consistently to interventions that have been highly effective for improving learning outcomes, and are able to do so in much more cost-effective ways than the status-quo patterns of spending.

Pedagogy

The science of education, teaching and classroom instruction (pedagogy) is a key determinant which decides how schooling inputs translate into learning outcomes. Today, following the right kind of pedagogy has become particularly challenging in India as several millions of first-generation learners have joined a rapidly expanding national schooling system. In particular, standard curricula, textbooks, and teaching practices that may have been designed for a time when access to education was more limited, may not serve the purpose in the new circumstances prevailing today. The default pedagogy of ‘completing the textbook’, does not reflect the learning levels of children in the classroom, as they always remain behind the textbook expects them to be. Evidences suggest that the ‘business-as-usual’ pedagogy – simply following the textbooks – can be improved with large positive impacts in early grades that target the child’s current level of learning:

i.
These positive results have been found consistently in programmes run by non-profit organisations in several locations (including UP, Bihar, Uttaranchal, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh).

ii.
The estimated impact of these interventions have been considerably high often exceeding the learning gains from a full year of schooling (their instructional time period is typically only a small fraction of the duration of the scheduled school year).

iii.
These interventions are typically delivered by modestly paid community teachers, who mostly do not have formal teacher training.

iv.
The supplemental remedial instruction programmes are highly cost effective and deliver significant learning gains at much lower costs than the large investments in standard schooling system.

Governance

Another explanation for the ‘low correlation between increases in spending on educational inputs and improved learning outcomes’ may be the
weak governance
of the education system and limited effort on the part of teachers and administrators to improve student learning levels:

i.
The most striking symptom of weak governance is the high rate of teacher absence in government-run schools. While teacher absence rates were over 25 per cent across India in 2003, an all-India panel survey in 2010 that covered the same villages found that teacher absence in rural India was still around 24 per cent.

ii.
The fiscal cost of teacher absence was estimated at around Rs 7,500 crore per year suggesting that governance challenges remain paramount.

iii.
There is evidence that even modest improvements in governance can yield significant returns. Improving monitoring and supervision of schools is significantly correlated with reductions in teacher absence, and investing in improved governance by increasing the frequency of monitoring could yield an eight-to-tenfold return on investment in terms of reducing the fiscal cost of teacher absence.

iv.
The importance of motivating teachers by rewarding good performance has also been pointed out by the evidences. Rigorous evaluations of carefully designed systems of teacher performance pay in Andhra Pradesh show substantial improvements in student learning in response to even very modest amounts of ‘performance-linked pay’ for teachers, that was typically not more than 3 per cent of annual pay.

v.
Evidence from a long-term follow up shows that teacher performance pay was 15 to 20 more times more effective for raising student learning than reductions in pupil-teacher ratios.

vi.
More broadly, these results suggest that the performance of front-line government employees depends less on the level of pay and more on its structure.

WAY TO POLICY

Putting the lessons taken from the evidences discussed above, following three immediate policy measures are desired at the moment for right kind of ‘human resource preparedness’
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.

1.
Make learning outcomes an explicit goal of primary education policy and invest in regular and independent high-quality measurement of learning outcomes. While independently measuring and administratively focusing on learning outcomes will not by itself lead to improvement, it will serve to focus the energies of the education system on the outcome that actually matters to millions of first-generation learners, which is functional literacy and numeracy.

2.
Launch a national campaign of supplemental instruction targeted to the current level of learning of children (as opposed to teaching to the ‘textbook’) delivered by locally hired teacher assistants, with a goal of reaching minimum absolute standards of learning for all children. There is urgent need for a
mission-like
focus on delivering “universal functional literacy and numeracy” that allow children to
‘read to learn’
. The evidence strongly supports scaling up supplemental instruction programmes using locally hired short-term teaching assistants that are targeted to the level of learning of the child, and the cost-effectiveness of this intervention also makes it easily scalable.

3.
Pay urgent attention to issues of teacher governance including better monitoring and supervision as well as teacher performance measurement and management. A basic principle of effective management of organisations is to have clear goals and to reward employees for contributing towards meeting those goals. The extent to which the status quo does not do this effectively is highlighted in the large positive impacts found from even very modest improvements in the alignment of employee rewards with organisational goals. There can be potentially large returns of implementing these ideas in education and beyond.

The next decade will see the largest ever number of citizens in the school system at any point in Indian history (or future), and it is critical that this generation that represents the
demographic dividend
be equipped with the literacy and skills needed to participate fully in a rapidly modernising world. In a fiscally constrained environment, it is also imperative to use evidence to implement cost-effective policies that maximise the social returns on any given level of public investment. The growing body of high-quality research on primary education in the past decade provides opportunity for putting this principle into practice.

CAUTIONS TO PREPAREDNESS

The economic history of recent times is replete with examples of economies that were supposed to have great potential but ultimately did not achieve rapid economic growth and improvements in standards of living. We also have, at the same time, instances of economies classified as
basket cases
that achieved rapid turnarounds. India’s achievement in the post-reform period and South Korea’s rapid transformation surely fall in this latter category. But India’s continuing on a rapid growth path is not preordained. Besides favourable circumstances, it requires deft policy making and a broad vision of the future, possible risks, and opportunities. We stand at a crossroads where we need to develop a clear strategy for continued inclusive growth. Let us consider what might happen under different hypothetical scenarios based on informed estimates, which reflect the forces that will be at play:
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