A Centre-sponsored study recommended making civil servants and other officials admit their children to government schools in their respective areas of posting to improve quality of the public education.





“The government employees, right from the IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officer to the peon, and public representatives must get their children enrolled in government schools to improve the quality of public education,” Niti Ayog-sponsored study noted in its report. The study was conducted by Guru Arjan Dev Institute of Development Studies, based in Amritsar. Though it was a “diagnostic analysis” of elementary education in rural Punjab, the study team made its recommendation for making public servants admit their children to government schools across the country.



The students’ learning outcome across the country has remained “unsatisfactory and far below than the expectations,” the study team noted in its report to the Niti Ayog.



“The goal of universal elementary education remains elusive and a distant dream. Education department must review the process and come out with a foolproof model,” principal investigator Gursharan Singh Kainth of the study team suggested in the report.



This comes a year after the Allahabad High Court directed the Uttar Pradesh government to work out modalities to ensure that all government servants send their children to primary schools run by the state basic education board.



In the executive summary of the report, Kainth also highlighted some “harsh realities” that the education system of Punjab and other states were faces.



“There is a lot of political interference in the functioning of schools, resulting in rewarding of non-deserving and punishing of non-sycophants. A grievous shortage of teachers in schools has done an irreparable harm to the system. No detention policy just helps the government show literacy figures, without imparting actual literacy,” he underlined.



The study team recommended for strengthening the government schools, making a strong pitch for lending “the required financial support” to the privately managed schools as well, instead of “leaving their fate to the market forces.”



“Sadly, most successful persons today have had their education from private schools. Today, if a teacher applies for a government job, it is only because she or he knows that the work there is less and the salary good. They need to work hard, like the teachers of private schools,” Kainth noted in the report.

