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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 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.
The figures represent excess supply and shortage of teachers based on the student-teacher ratio of 40:1.
- 3.
From “How have the Schools designed their school education budgets”: CBGA 2016.
- 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.
The World Bank social sector expenditure review was undertaken in 2012 and analyzed per capita allocation of development spending across the 36 districts.
- 6.
- 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.
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.
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.
See Kingdon et al. (2014) for a global literature review on the political economy of education systems in developing country contexts.
References
Alesina, A., & La Ferrara, E. (2000). Participation in heterogeneous communities. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115(3), 847–904.
Alesina, A., Baqir, R., & Easterly, W. (1999). Public goods and ethnic divisions. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114(4), 1243–1284.
Baldwin, K., & Huber, J. D. (2010). Economic versus cultural differences: Forms of ethnic diversity and public goods provision. American Political Science Review, 104(4), 644–662.
Banerjee, A. (2004). Who is getting the public goods in India? Some evidence and some speculation. India’s Emerging Economy, 183–213.
Banerjee, A., Iyer, L., & Somanathan, R. (2005). History, social divisions, and public goods in rural India. Journal of the European Economic Association, 3(2–3), 639–647.
Bardhan, P., & Mookherjee, D. (2006). Decentralisation and accountability in infrastructure delivery in developing countries. The Economic Journal, 116(508), 101–127.
Bari, F. & Malik R. with Raza, F. (2017). Raising domestic resources for equitable education in Pakistan. Background paper for the Global Commission on Education Financing.
Becker, G. S. (1992). Human capital and the economy. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 136(1), 85–92.
Chaudhary, L. (2009). Determinants of primary schooling in British India. The Journal of Economic History, 69(1), 269–302.
Chaudhary, A., & Vyborny, K. (2013). Patronage in Rural Punjab: Evidence from a New Household Survey Dataset. The Lahore Journal Of Economics, 18, 183.
Chaudhary, L., Musacchio, A., Nafziger, S., & Yan, S. (2012). Big BRICs, weak foundations: The beginning of public elementary education in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Explorations in Economic History, 49(2), 221–240.
Cheema, A. (2007). Governance impediments to pro-poor change in Pakistan. In Asian Development Bank paper TA.
Cheema, A. (2017). The political economy of economic empowerment: Bringing politics and society back. IDS working paper no. 484. Vol 2017.
Cheema, A., & Siddiqi, B. (2008). Colonial village institutions, path dependence and public good provision: Do peasant republics serve better than feudal estates? Mimeo: LUMS.
Chudgar, A., & Luschei, T. F. (2009). National income, income inequality, and the importance of schools: A hierarchical cross-national comparison. American Educational Research Journal, 46(3), 626–658.
De Janvry, A., Finan, F., & Sadoulet, E. (2012). Local electoral incentives and decentralized program performance. Review of Economics and Statistics, 94(3), 672–685.
Dreze, J., & Gazdar, H. (1997). Indian development: Selected regional perspectives. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Dreze, J., & Sen, A. (1999). India: Economic and social opportunity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Easterlin, R. A. (1981). Why isn’t the whole world developed? The Journal of Economic History, 41(1), 1–17.
Easterly, W. (2001). The political economy of growth without development: A case study of Pakistan. In Paper for the analytical narratives of growth project. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Glewwe, P. W., Hanushek, E. A., Humpage, S. D., & Ravina, R. (2011). School resources and educational outcomes in developing countries: A review of the literature from 1990 to 2010 (Vol. w17554). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Gropello, E. D. (2004). Education decentralization and accountability relationships in Latin America. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Hickey, S. (2013). Thinking about the politics of inclusive development: Towards a relational approach (ESID working paper 1). Manchester: Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre, The University of Manchester.
Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states (Vol. 25). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hossain, N., Hassan, M., Rahman, M., Ali, K., & Islam, I. (2017). The problem with teachers: The political settlement and education quality reforms in Bangladesh. Manchester: Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre.
Kingdon, G., Little, A., Aslam, M., Rawal, S., Moe, T., Patrinos, H., Beteille, T., Banerjee, R., Parton, B., & Sharma, S. (2014). A rigorous review of the political economy of education systems in developing countries. London: Institute of Education.
Labaree, D. F. (2007). Education, markets, and the public good: Selected works of David F. Labaree (Routledge world library of educationalists). London: Routledge.
Levy, B., Cameron, R., Hoadley, U., & Naidoo, V. (Eds.). (2018). The politics and governance of basic education: A tale of two south African provinces. Oxford University Press: New York
Malik, R., & Rose, P. (2015). Financing education in Pakistan opportunities for action. Country Case Study for the Oslo Summit on Education for Development. Oslo
Miguel, E., & Gugerty, M. (2005). Ethnic diversity, social sanctions, and public goods in western Kenya. Journal of Public Economics, 89(2005), 2325–2368.
Patnam, M. (2009) Power politics and public good provisioning: Understanding institutional persistence in rural Punjab.
Pritchett, L. (2015). Creating education systems coherent for learning outcomes: Making the transition from schooling to learning. RISE-WP-15/005. Available at https://www.riseprogramme.org/sites/www.riseprogramme.org/files/publications/RISE_WP-005_Pritchett_0.pdf
Pritchett, L. (2018). The Politics of Learning: Directions for Future Research. Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) Working Paper. Available at https://www.riseprogramme.org/sites/www.riseprogramme.org/files/publications/RISE_WP-020_Pritchett.pdf
Priyam, M. (2015). Contested politics of educational reform in India: Aligning opportunities with interests. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
PROBE team (1999). Public Report on Basic education in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press
Shultz, T. (1962). Reflections on investment in man. Journal of Political Economy, 70(5), 1–8.
World Bank. (2003). World Development report 2004: Making services work for poor people. World Bank. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/5986. License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
World Bank. (2018). World development report: Learning to realize Education’s promise. 2018. Washington, DC: World Bank.
World Bank. (2018). Poverty and shared prosperity 2018: Piecing together the poverty puzzle. Washington, DC: World Bank. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/30418. License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this entry
Cite this entry
Malik, R., De, A. (2021). Regional Imbalances in Provisioning and Participation in Education in India and Pakistan. In: Sarangapani, P.M., Pappu, R. (eds) Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia. Global Education Systems. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0032-9_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0032-9_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-15-0031-2
Online ISBN: 978-981-15-0032-9
eBook Packages: EducationReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Education