One of the questions on budget eve is: will promoting basic education along with addressing gender gaps in education be a priority? The two charts depicting gender gaps, based on four large samples of the National Sample Survey, span the last two decades and indicate the following: • Illiteracy is on the decline, in both rural and urban areas, as is the gender gap among the illiterates• Rural gender gaps are much larger than urban gaps at all levels of education• The gaps in ‘literate, upto primary’ category have declined in rural India and much more sharply in urban India• The problem starts in middle school: the gender gap shows a very slight decline in rural areas, and a clearer decline in urban areas. Middle school drop-outs are a serious problem for girls• For secondary/ higher secondary levels, in rural areas, there is an overall increase in gender gaps, despite the decline in the last five years. The picture is much better in urban areas, with a steady decline in gender gaps for this level• For the graduate and above category, again rural areas show an increase in gender gaps over the last 20 years, with a slight overall fall in urban areas, despite improvement in the last five yearsWhat does this picture imply for the Union budget? • India cannot aim to be an economic superpower with these striking gender disparities in education. The government, via its budgetary allocations (among other things), has to decisively target education as a priority area• The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) is one of the eight flagship programmes of the UPA government. In addition to promoting an overall increase in education, incentives to lower gender gaps have to be built into all such schemes. A simple, but critical, intervention could be the establishment of a middle school in each village, as many girls and dalits report dropping out at the middle school level both because of the greater distance, lack of proper transport facilities (complicated by the onset of puberty for girls), as well as because of the sheer inability to afford the extra travel costs even when there is a strong will to continue education. Lack of supplementary resources, like teaching aids for English, mathematics and science, are additional factors that result in high drop-outs • On paper, the SSA contains several targeted provisions for girls, such as, free textbooks upto Class VIII, separate toilet, recruitment of 50 per cent women teachers, gender sensitisation, community mobilisation efforts and so forth. One, the implementation record of these recommendations is dismal, as independent surveys have shown. Two, several of these measures, like the latter two, are easier to define on paper than in practice. Finally, even with full implementation and proper conceptualisation, these would be ineffective in the absence of middle schools at the village level.
