Breathe Education- Boosting literacy rate in Bihar taking it from 60% to 90%

Breathe Education- Boosting literacy rate in Bihar taking it from 60% to 90%

Illiteracy is not a problem that can be resolved overnight. Besides the main aim is to reduce it to the extent possible. Further, the challenge is to ensure that the education imparted is adding value and hence it becomes imperative to ensure that it is standardized and accessible.

Standardizing would mean to ensure that a student of class 5 of a public school in a city is in parity with another class 5 student in a town or a village. There are dual aspects to maintain this position, i.e. the syllabus and curriculum should be at equivalence and the teachers imparting such knowledge should also be equally competent. The national prescribed students per teacher are 40, however, the census data showed that it was 62 for Bihar. Given such stats, it is maybe not difficult to conclude that quality is compromised.

Coming to another issue i.e. accessibility. Undoubtedly both are important, however, this, in my opinion, is a larger challenge since this precedes the previous steps. There are 71 thousand+ schools in the state of Bihar. However, most of them are primary schools (commonly know as anganwadi). The state that has one of the oldest universities like the Nalanda (dating back to the fifteenth century) lacks in terms of count of secondary schools. The state has one of the highest number of dropouts post-primary education. This may be attributed to various factors, however, the prime reason is the distance to be covered by the students. Once they join, they face issues of not being aligned with the class (since others had studied in the same school since birth) and they also have to assist their families in the farms/family business.

On average a student easily spends over two hours in travel time. This time accounts to discouraging the scheme of education given that the opportunities post education are also not visible to them since considerable educated people migrate to cities or to another state altogether. There are barely any precedents in front of them to motivate them and they believe what happened to others who discontinued education is also in their faith making it an elephant problem. Based on their experience of observing their seniors they choose their path.

All these facts and figures call for deeper analysis and require a solution. Given the advent of technology, it should definitely be leveraged to find an innovative method to solve the problem.  I am trying to solve the accessibility issue in the given instance. There are extremely cost-effective tablets and projectors (ranging from INR 3,000 - 8,000) available nowadays which have reasonable good quality and are covered by warranty. The NCERT has quite comprehensively compiled all the books from class one to twelfth on one portal. The students can refer them at any given point in time over the web. Efforts should now be taken to record grade-wise lectures and make it available to schools. There should also be training given to the teachers to enable them to teach and monitor higher classes too. Hence, the teaching will be in parts i.e. a mix of online and offline learning. This will ensure that the primary schools are now enabled to even teach for higher grades. Veteran actors like Amitabh Bachchan should be requested to promote our initiative.

The primary schools are also for fewer hours as against the secondary schools. There are schools that even utilize the same space by keeping early school for primary and late school for secondary education.

Unfortunately, in the past few days, the state of Assam and Bihar suffered from severe floods. The floods destroyed a lot of property, including infrastructure in schools and it will be slow to bring back life to the drastically affected areas. There will also be a shortage of teaching staff and the presence of students. As a test market, these affected areas could be taken up since they will take time to recover and rebuilt infrastructure. In the interim period, the digital transition of education can be experimented ensuring that a larger crowd is catered to. The limited teachers can concentrate on some part of teaching wither focus on monitoring the class and each student’s progression. Once rehabilitation is completed the students will be able to breathe education just as easily as they breathe air.  

One day low-cost experiment:

It is crucial to test the acceptance of the proposed model of standardizing and digitizing the mode of imparting education in rural Bihar. There are many ways to check the same, however, to optimize the use of resources it becomes imperative to begin with a low-cost experiment. To check the acceptance of the experiment, a test on a handful students can be conducted to understand their transition from blackboard to a projected board and from books to tablets. This approach should answer multiple questions with respect to the preliminary mindset, the method to be adopted to ensure a comfortable shift in the method, the training required to be imparted to the teachers/professors while setting up the devices for the first time, the portion of teaching to be done by them and parts to be covered through the recorded lectures.

The low-cost experiment will be done in the following manner:-

1. Vikasana (the social impact club of IIMB) collect the kids of the staff who work for IIMB and on every Saturday and Sunday gives lectures on basic subjects like English and Mathematics, since private tutorship is expensive for them.
2. Record the lecture in the morning and in the afternoon when the kids come, they can be shown the recorded lecture for some part of the topic over a budget projector/tablet with bluetooth speakers.
3. This will be followed by a club member teaching the remaining topic and solving the doubt of the students.
4. The reaction of the kids during the course of the entire class (digital and manual) will b recorded.
5. This will be followed by a quick feedback secession to capture users opinions. 

Cost of Experimentation- I have a budget projector as well as a tablet, hence the cost of experimentation would be limited to the opportunity cost of time spent. However, it shall be between  INR 3,000- INR 50.000 in case no tablet is available.