BackOpinion | Let’s focus on demand for education
Policy-wise, India needs to work on both demand and supply. And the latter may still be what it’s best equipped to reform
PremiumNobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, in their seminal work, "Poor Economics : A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, not only draw insights from various ground-level experiments that involve field trials in poverty-stricken areas, they offer policy advice based on their learnings. In the sphere of education, it seems they would have India go beyond the mere supply of schools, and even efforts to get children into classrooms (via midday meals and so on), and focus on demand for education.
The generation of demand is not always easy, it turns out, especially not in remote areas that aren’t exposed to the modern economy. School enrolment, the development economists found, depends on the returns that families foresee on their investment (of time or opportunity cost, if it’s free). To test this causality, a study was conducted in three randomly selected villages in northern India. Exposed to job opportunities for women at business process outsourcing (BPO) centres, families began to re-evaluate their returns and the school enrolment of girls went up significantly.
Of course, education quality is essential for demand to rise, and it’s here that supply lacunae act as a hindrance. Thanks to exposure via the internet, etc., demand appears to be increasing anyway, but the government’s supply of education seems at odds with new patterns of demand. Very few state-run schools in India are English medium, for example, while education in this job-assuring language is what the country’s have-nots are increasingly looking for. Policy-wise, India needs to work on both demand and supply. And the latter may still be what it’s best equipped to reform.
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