What Can Community Participation Bring About?: Lessons from Two Primary Education Programmes in India

Abstract

  In India the 1986 National Policy of Education, which puts a particular emphasis on achieving universal elementary education, encourages decentralised educational planning and management as well as community participation, mainly for school management through Village Education Committees (VECs) and resource mobilisation. The government launched various primary education programmes since the 1990s, among them Lok Jumbish and the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP). Both programmes aimed to achieve universal elementary education. Community participation and decentralisation were among the strategies used to achieve the objective. However, the meaning and reality of the two concepts differed significantly between the two programmes. This study investigates the relationship between community participation and educational development at the village level in the context of different types of decentralisation adopted by the two education programmes. The research is predominantly a qualitative case study but also uses quantitative data to supplement the qualitative data. The fieldwork was conducted in five villages in Rajasthan for Lok Jumbish, and five in Madhya Pradesh for DPEP.

  The analysis revealed that Lok Jumbish participation can be characterised as transformative with a wide range of villagers having opportunities for decision-making in educational planning. On the other hand, DPEP participation can be characterised as instrumental, directed at school management through the Village Education Committees. Community participation was mainly through the VEC, the majority of whose members were local government (panchayat) members or villagers nominated by panchayat members, particularly men of the dominant castes, in DPEP, lacking the potential breadth of Lok Jumbish VEC membership.

  In the villages studied, the analysis shows that community participation had generally contributed to greater educational improvements in Lok Jumbish villages than in DPEP villages, mainly as a result of the empowerment of Lok Jumbish villagers. In all Lok Jumbish villages, improvements were found in the access and enrolment of both boys and girls, school resources, school facilities, and transparency and accountability of school management. In DPEP, the effects of participation were limited to the more developed villages, where enrolment increased, the teachers’ work attendance improved to some extent, and there was greater transparency in spending the DPEP fund for school furniture.

  The research findings can contribute to improving community participation in Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA)–the elementary education programme currently conducted by the Indian government–necessary for improving educational provision. Particularly relevant is the clarification of the different nature of community participation and the issues of VEC representation and of the actual participation of participants. The major challenges in primary education remain particularly in the ‘difficult-to-reach’ areas in terms of geography and ethnic/social groups. SSA can learn from the Lok Jumbish approach to community participation in the less developed villages researched in this study.