Education in India

Career Launcher and SKS Microfinance launch rural school chain in Andhra Pradesh

Career Launcher chain of schools and SKS Microfinance have jointly launched SKS-CL Academy to set up English medium schools in rural Andhra Pradesh. The Academy would set up 10 schools in Nalgonda, Khammam, Rangareddy and Medak districts in the State in the pilot phase to provide primary education till third standard using the national open school syllabus with special emphasis on technology.

While Career Launcher would manage and run the schools, Hyderabad-based SKS Microfinance would take care of marketing and providing education loans for students. "It is the acute lacuna of quality education in rural areas which made us opt for this venture," Mr R. Satyanarayanan, Chairman, Career Launcher Group, said in a release.

according to a report in the Business Line.

R. Satyanarayanan muses on the occasion of the launch of the SKS-CL Academy and says the schooling will cost Rs. 175 per month.

Schools at 175 Rupees a month : It is early days yet. Very early, indeed. No new idea can be counted as success until it grows her own roots on the ground and finds more nurturers than the inventors of the idea. Isn’t that stating the obvious ?

As Shashi Bhushan Kumar, the district collector of Khammam, Andhra Pradesh went about planting a sapling inside our Kusumanchi school, my mind was wandering about the times in the future when this sapling would become a tree. Would it become a tree or struggle to grow in her new home – SKS-CL Academy !! It is early days yet. Very early, indeed.

We had a very healthy congregation of officials, community leaders, villagers, parents and children at the launch of our first rural school on Saturday, July 05, 2008. There are 10 Rural Schools across the districts of Khammam, Nalgonda, Ranga Reddy and Medak that have got underway in AP which hope to provide high quality public education at affordable fees in rural parts of India.

This project employs rural women and men as teachers who are barely educated themselves but have a lot of spunk and enthusiasm. A few of them come from economic backgrounds that are BPL (Below Poverty Line) for sure. The collector of a district is a tall statured person beyond reach for them. It was only after the inauguration that I discovered that our own mentors were very sure that the Collector is unlikely to show up for the event for their school is so small, modest and poor that it is not fit for a collector to visit them.
I am sure that the stature of their school went up in their own eyes during the course of the inaugural function. And they said in no uncertain terms – “ Collector sahib goes to even big functions only for a few minutes. We never thought he would even come to SKS – CL Academy”.

Currently, I view it as an R & D project that calls for a whole lot of innovation in order to make it viable as well as scalable. It is a worthy project that attempts to solve the problem of capacity building for India by blending schooling with employability training in rural parts of the country. Insha Allah, We will succeed.

I'm quite excited about the SKS-CL Academy and look forward to how this initiative shapes up.

Career Launcher also runs

• Indus World Schools (for the K-12 segment) in Hyderabad, Indore, Bhiwani, Mandi and Raipur, and
• Ananda Playschools in Hyderabad, Indore and NOIDA
  

Addendum: A report in Business Standard provides some more details.

According to SKS chief operating officer MR Rao, the schools are being opened to cater to the aspiration of the institution's members. The children will not only be provided with English medium education, but will also have computer classes. SKS members can opt for an education loan of Rs 3,100 to provide quality education to their children. The school will run at a fraction of regular fees and the monthly fee for KG and Class I is Rs 175. The SKS-CL Academy is open to children of non-members as well, Rao said.

"These schools would also be leveraged to provide further enhancements for social development and build an enterprise culture in the village," Nandini Sood, head of CL Rural Academy initiative, pointed out.

Determinants of Household Expenditure on School Education in Rural India

A Literature Review on Service Delivery in India provides a summary of a paper by Jandhyala B.G. Tilak titled Determinants of Household Expenditure on Education in Rural India, originally published as NCAER Working Paper No.88. (2002).

Tilak’s study, also based on the results of NCAER’s 1994 Human Development in India (HDI) survey, begins by noting that the existing literature on household expenditures on education in India is very limited, and that research on the determinants of household expenditure is “virtually non-existent.”

Attempting to partially fill this research gap, Tilak looks at three broad areas:

1. the extent of household expenditure on education by different groups;
   
2. the elasticity of household expenditure on education to changes in both household income and government expenditure on education; and
   
3. the determinants of household expenditure on education.

Several important results emerge.

• First, it is found, there is a complete absence of “free education” in India: regardless of a household’s socio-economic background, spending on education is very substantial even at the primary school level.
• Second, “indirect” costs, such as books, uniforms and examination fees, are very high, even in government-run schools, including at the primary level.
• Third, given the absence of a well-developed credit market for education, expenditure on education is highly (and positively) correlated with income.
• Fourth, willingness to pay and “compulsion to pay” (i.e., the need to compensate for a shortage of government spending on education) are both important factors.
• Fifth, government spending and household spending on education are not substitutes, but complements: an increase in government spending is associated with an increase in household spending (due to an “enthusiasm effect” resulting from improvements in school facilities, number of teachers, etc.); conversely, a reduction in government expenditure leads to a decline in household spending on education. (Equivalently, the elasticity of household expenditure to government expenditure is found to be almost unitary, and positive.)
• Finally, it is found that the provision of schooling in rural habitations, or the provision of such school incentives as mid-day meals, uniforms, textbooks, etc., are both associated with increased household demand for education.

Looking at the determinants of household expenditure, Tilak finds, as might be expected, that income levels, demographic factors, occupation types, school type, and the level of village development, are all important factors.