The eleventh five year plan lays down these monitorable targets for primary education: cut primary school dropout rate from 52.2 per cent to 20 per cent and increase literacy rate for age seven and above to 85 per cent.

The government’s main programme for primary education is the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) launched in 2001. Briefly, the SSA aimed at getting all children into school; achieve universal primary school completion by 2007, and universal middle school completion (8 years of schooling) by 2010. It aimed at doing so by a combination of increasing supply of primary schools, infrastructure-improving quality of education, and through other measures such as enrollment drives. Other programmes such as the mid-day-meal (MDM) scheme complimented this initiative. Then there’ve been many state-level incentives to get children into school. Overall there is a large variety of such incentives ranging from free food to free clothing to cash stipends for learning material and transport provided by central and state governments. Since then tens of thousands of crores are spent annually on SSA and MDM.

As a consequence, enrollment rates have shot up dramatically. Some believe that these incentives have worked; still others believe that high enrollment rates are largely a procedural issue. That is, in many parts of the country children are ‘automatically’ enrolled in the school registers when they get into the school going age. Many such children do not actually attend. But this authors’ experience has been that attendance rates are also quite high across the country — the primary reason being the mid-day-meal — who would refuse a free lunch?

... contd.