Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in her latest budget speech, “Viksit Bharat encompasses 100 percent good quality school education.” Yet, education remained grossly underfunded in her budget outlay for the year, with an expenditure of 2.9 percent of the GDP, much below the 6 percent recommended by the Kothari Commission.
The Indian education system is plagued by numerous longstanding structural issues. However, governments continue to attempt quick-fix solutions. One such recent intervention is the ‘detention’ policy, replacing the no-detention policy (NDP).
The NDP, introduced through the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education or RTE Act of 2009, is based on a child-centric approach that acknowledges that children’s ‘failure’ is primarily attributable to systemic failures. The NDP aimed to retain pupils in school by addressing their fear of examinations, as children were compelled to either repeat a class or forgo schooling altogether if they obtained low scores. Section 16 of the law prohibited holding back and expelling children till they completed 8th class.
Ten years after the law’s enactment, it was amended to empower governments to detain students in the 5th and 8th classes—a knee-jerk reaction to some states and territories attributing their declining learning levels to NDP. More recently, the Centre introduced the detention policy in all central government-run schools.
The states had relied on the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for 2022 to highlight declining learning levels in rural government-run schools. However, it’s crucial to see the latest ASER, released this January, which paints a different picture. A comparison of the states that have withdrawn the NDP does not indicate any causal relationship with an increase or decrease in learning levels.
So the states relying on an earlier ASER without establishing a direct causal link between the fall in learning to the implementation of NDP are only shifting the burden on the parents and the blame on to children, as opposed to looking at the education system in a holistic manner.
Proponents of the detention policy claim that NDP has led to complacent students and teachers. So, instead of identifying and addressing the systemic issues that can improve learning outcomes, children are being made the scapegoats of our nation’s ill-equipped education system.
In 2012, the Central Advisory Board of Education constituted a sub-committee for assessing and implementing continuous and comprehensive evaluations (CCE) in the context of the NDP, which suggested a number of additional pedagogical interventions to supplement the NDP. These include regularly measuring learning outcomes to identify gaps in grade-level competencies, making school development plans to address the gaps, catalysing a performance-driven culture by rewarding high-performing students and teachers, and introducing CCE and allied evaluation techniques into BEd and other teacher training courses. There is little evidence to suggest that these recommendations were ever implemented.
In truth, retention of students at a grade has adverse consequences, especially on children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The detention policy disregards the inequalities entrenched in our society. Children are not insulated from their socio-economic environment. Along with the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyaan and the PM Poshan scheme, the RTE Act is meant to create a conducive environment for children to ‘remain’ in school by countering the socio-economic barriers to education.
Detention leads to bullying and stigmatisation, which is amplified for children from marginalised backgrounds. Such children are forced to opt to either receive an education in a hostile environment or save themselves from the humiliation of attending school. Opting for the latter means we, as a country, will be looking at a further spike in dropout rates and a steeper fall in enrolment, while also reopening the door to an increase in child labour. The detention policy is a mechanism to eliminate the most disadvantaged from the education system.
The Union government continues with a fairytale reiteration of Section 16(4) of the RTE Act: “...no child shall be expelled from school until the completion of elementary education ensuring every child’s right to education”. In practice, the passive act of ‘not expelling’ is not adequate to ensure that children ‘compulsorily’ attain elementary education. It requires active state effort to prevent dropouts and facilitate enrolments, among other measures. Statistically, the dropout rate in the upper primary levels, classes 5th to 8th, is far from under control—increasing from 1.9 percent in 2020-21 to 8.1 percent in 2022-23, and hovering at a high of 5.2 percent according to the latest UDISE+ or Unified District Information System for Education Report for 2023-24.
There are a host of improvement measures for teacher support and training, school infrastructure, pedagogy and curriculum that can improve the learning levels of students. However, the detention versus no-detention debate continues to be pushed centre-stage, while the really impactful tools for improving education remain out of focus from the larger political discourse.
With inputs from Sneha Priya Yanappa, Vidhi, Karnataka
(Views are personal)
Avinash Reddy Pichhili | Co-founder, DEVISE
Deepa Padmar | Advocate, Associate Fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy