Civil Society and Education – A Post-Independence Trajectory

In post-Independence India, the expansion of civil society actors was primarily a response to the inability of the state to effectively deliver basic public services, including education, mainly to historically disadvantaged groups and the rural population. Development programs of the State, since the 1970s, reached out to civil society organizations (CSOs) to address its own supply-side constraints. These also tried to engage CSOs as outreach agencies that could undertake activities such as running community learning centres and mobilizing for adult education.

Many CSOs had been constituted in the colonial period and existed in various forms. These included identity-based (religion, caste, language) entities, philanthropies established by individuals and local notables, and social reforms oriented organizations. Many new CSOs also came into being concurrently with the development programs of the post-independent State. All these together, thus, became the means through which both technical expertise and supplemental public resources could reach underserved geographies and communities in education.

As far as we know, there are no official estimates of these various types of CSOs at different times in history. However, many trace the origins of the idea of mass education to the schools for lower castes and girls set up by missionaries in the 19th century. Besides addressing regional and social disparities in terms of the reach of State institutions (i.e., government schools), CSOs played a significant role by marking their presence in remote and difficult areas. This at one level helped children, who otherwise would have had no access to education, due to social, ethnic, cultural, and geographical barriers, to get education. At another level, this promoted community awareness and participation in demand-side factors affecting schooling.

One must also make a separate mention here of the People’s Science Movement from the early 1950s. This played a distinctive role in the expansion of mass education. Under the aegis of this movement, many CSOs emerged with the primary goal of building scientific awareness among the larger populace.

At the same time, many of these organizations could work on social mobilization for both adult education and school education, with the contributions of Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), Tamil Nadu Science Forum, Marathi Vigyan Parishad, Assam Science Society and Paschim Banga Vigyan Manch, being especially notable.

The enduring work of these groups led to a coalition of peoples’ science groups across the country, and the emergence of Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (BGVS) as a separate organization focused on promoting literacy in a campaign mode. The setting up of Eklavya in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, in the early 1980s, was also an outcome of this larger movement. The organization, thereafter, has become a prominent one in the domain of educational innovations and curriculum development.

While some CSOs remained small in terms of their outreach and domains of work, others expanded to work across multiple geographies and domains, and simultaneously also worked closely with the government system. A study, in 2001, focussed on six such CSOs. These included M. Venkatarangaiya (MV) Foundation, Pratham, Bodh Shiksha Samiti, Rishi Valley Rural Education Centre, Eklavya, and Centre for Educational Management and Development.

The study showed that the work of these CSOs, which worked at a relatively larger scale with the government, had supplemented the State’ efforts. They had initiated innovative programs in various domains of education, extended outreach in areas that had poor government outreach, and strengthened the accountability of the government. The domains included child labour eradication, universalization of pre-primary and primary education in a metropolis, appropriate primary education for the urban poor, multigrade multi-level teaching learning model (a precursor to ABL), pedagogic innovations, and school improvement through management inputs.

The increased presence of CSOs from the early decades after Independence, till the 1990s, ‘could be regarded as a response to a relatively conservative education sector program and/or the government’s low capacity to ensure an acceptable delivery of education’ (Fennell, 2007: 206).

However, the transition in the global North towards New Public Management (NPM) approaches in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by the same in the global South, including the processes of liberalization, privatization and globalization in India with the economic reforms of the early 1990s, saw a change in the CSO landscape. The State began to regard the private sector and its principles as a means of addressing its own failure at multiple levels – provisioning, financing, regulation, and monitoring and accountability in education.

At this juncture, we can bring into focus another important civil society actor, teachers and their unions, within the school education system. Studies have noted the widespread presence of teacher unions for schoolteachers in India, both registered and unregistered. Teacher Unions (TUs) have varying typologies depending on their presence at different levels of the federal government system, levels of schooling, school type (management), teacher contract type and so on.

The NPM paradigm has been more inclined to regard teacher unions as a deterrent to educational reforms. This is because of the political linkages that these unions have and the challenges to administrative accountability mechanisms these linkages pose.

However, other studies have underscored the progressive role that teacher unions and teacher collectives can play in educational reform processes. These studies include research work done by organizations such as the Pratichi Trust in West Bengal, and that of Azim Premji Foundation undertaken across more than five states.

The shift towards a neoliberal State and NPM approaches in public administration showed up in a more explicit recognition of a larger role of non-State actors, including the private sector, in plan documents and policy discourses in education from the 12th Five Year Plan. This was evident in various forms, from an emphasis on public-private partnerships (PPPs), an expanded role and presence of non-State actors in a diverse range of education services (including textbooks and other curricular products, digital and multimedia solutions for teaching-learning, and teacher training), and mandatory corporate social responsibility policies for specific profitable businesses.

These non-State actors are considerably different from the earlier CSOs. These comprise a range of corporate social responsibility initiatives, large philanthropic trusts established by corporations, and entrepreneurial ventures in education.

The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (2009) (RTE), has also probably played a contradictory role vis-à-vis the earlier environment of CSOs. Many of the earlier CSOs were charitable trusts, NGOs, religious/ social-identity based groups that provided low/no-cost education for poor and marginal sections of the population. This education was provided through alternatives such as community schools, alternative schools, non-formal education centres and bridge programs. The regulatory framework of the RTE, with respect to school infrastructure, facilities and teacher qualifications, has been noted to have counterproductive effects on such initiatives. This is because these alternative initiatives were often run with limited resources, but could reach a large section of poor children of school-going age.

Finally, the global development policy environment targeting the fulfilment of SDG goals, has also reinforced the need and presence of philanthropic interventions in the education sector to meet financing and innovation challenges that the private sector is purportedly better equipped for. The interconnections between the scales of global and national non-State actors’ interventions are growing tighter with emerging forms of multi-stakeholder, cross-national collaborations. Here we see international financing agencies investing in small and medium-level local education entrepreneurships drawing on a vocabulary of ‘social impact investment’ that considers as important both economic returns and measures of social benefit.

There is now a vast and disparate range of philanthropic categories. These include family philanthropies, corporate philanthropies, CSR arms of companies, and banks with philanthropic funding from HNWIs or donor-advised funds.

Besides these, there is also a new set of non-State actors in education through different global-local networks (e.g., the Teach for India fellows), and even national or sub-national fellowship programs of large CSRs (e.g., Wipro Foundation, Piramal Foundation, SBI Youth Fellowship) and the State (e.g., prime minister, and chief minister fellowships, instituted by different states).

A very different form of non-State actors is becoming visible in the context of rising privatization, withdrawal of the State in education delivery, and de facto deregulation of private actors operating in education. These are organically formed parents’ groups among private school catchments that operate primarily in the protest-mode.

Though they currently have no legal standing, they exist across scales of school, locality, state as well as an umbrella pan-India organization. As they begin to collaborate and stabilize outside of the specific concern over rising fees over which they were formed, their agendas are expanding to issues of child safety, claims of corruption in public examinations, and so on.

Coming largely from middle-class sections of the population that access private schools, these groups are able to marshal social, political and cultural resources. These include media advocacy, local level political and bureaucratic support, digital access and legal support. All of these are beyond the reach of poorer disadvantaged groups.

The trajectory of CSOs in the context of the Indian school education system, has indeed undergone significant changes since the early decades of Independence. It is important to note that these transitions in the organizational forms, nature and approaches to educational reforms have been closely tied to questions of political economy, with changing relations between the State, the Market, and the citizenry shaping these transitions in specific directions.

It is also important to note that the nature of these changes, though reflecting broader patterns across the country, do differ from state to state, with the particular history of social movements, political will of the State to invest in public education, and a proactive bureaucracy often contributing to these differences across the states.

Acknowledgment:

I am grateful to Joyeeta Dey, doctoral student, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, for her support on specific sections of this paper.