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Regional Imbalances in Provisioning and Participation in Education in India and Pakistan

Political Economy Perspectives

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia

Part of the book series: Global Education Systems ((GES))

  • 206 Accesses

Abstract

Despite substantial progress over the past couple of decades, regional inequalities in participation and provision in education have persisted in South Asia. Persistent inequalities in provision and low quality of public services represent a failure of service delivery. There is a growing recognition that failures of service delivery are to be understood as failures of governance, and governance is a process that links various actors (including government functionaries, political representatives, teachers and school managers, students, parents, and communities) in relationships of accountability. This chapter documents regional inequalities in outcomes and resource allocations in India and Pakistan. Drawing on political economy frameworks, it describes accountability relationships that comprise systems of education service delivery and rediscovers empirical literature in the context of India and Pakistan that helps to inform understanding of the accountability relationships.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Education Management Information Systems refer to mechanisms of data collection that form information flows between schools, district, and provincial departments of education. Data collected through annual school census on enrollments, facilities, resource allocations and expenditures, and some other school-level indicators is collated into what becomes yearly EMIS data. In India there is a similar system in place under DISE (District Information System in Education) through which data from all recognized schools are collated annually and uploaded at schoolreportcards.in.

  2. 2.

    The figures represent excess supply and shortage of teachers based on the student-teacher ratio of 40:1.

  3. 3.

    From “How have the Schools designed their school education budgets”: CBGA 2016.

  4. 4.

    It is unclear whether the rules for needs assessment and subsequent construction of new government schools have caught up with expanding population numbers in both countries. The current needs assessment formula informing school construction in Pakistan internalizes a certain dropout rate between primary and higher schools, which are fewer in number and farther apart (assuming that fewer numbers will reach high schools than are in primary schools). Constitutional obligations in India and Pakistan for universal primary education require all children to complete 12 years of schooling (including K-10). In light of, a revision of bureaucratic rules may be required.

  5. 5.

    The World Bank social sector expenditure review was undertaken in 2012 and analyzed per capita allocation of development spending across the 36 districts.

  6. 6.

    There is a long-standing debate in the economics of education about whether resources matter for improvements in quality. See Glewwe et al. (2011) and Chudgar and Luschei (2009) for a review of evidence and debate.

  7. 7.

    Since then this framework has become central to a “systems approach” to thinking about education reform which moves way from looking at various components of service delivery in isolation and imagines it as a series of processes. Well-functioning systems exhibit certain properties, of which coherence across different functions is one. This thinking is foundational for the World Development Report 2018.

  8. 8.

    The framework develops the notion of principal-agent relationships in the context of education service delivery and governance. Each of the relationships has principals and agents.

  9. 9.

    The Hindu community is divided into a multitude of social groups, hierarchically graded and based on birth, and there have been several social reform movements in different regions in India to remove this hierarchy.

  10. 10.

    See Kingdon et al. (2014) for a global literature review on the political economy of education systems in developing country contexts.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Lahore, Pakistan

    Rabea Malik

  2. Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS), Lahore, Pakistan

    Rabea Malik

  3. Collaborative Research and Dissemination (CORD), New Delhi, India

    Anuradha De

Authors
  1. Rabea Malik
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  2. Anuradha De
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Correspondence to Rabea Malik .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

    Padma M. Sarangapani

  2. Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, India

    Rekha Pappu

Section Editor information

  1. Professor of Education Policy, College of Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA

    Amita Chudgar

  2. University of Oxford, Oxford, England, UK

    Monazza Aslam

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Malik, R., De, A. (2020). Regional Imbalances in Provisioning and Participation in Education in India and Pakistan. In: Sarangapani, P., Pappu, R. (eds) Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia. Global Education Systems. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3309-5_22-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3309-5_22-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-981-13-3309-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-3309-5

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