The same study also showed that Bihar has the highest percentage of children (in 6-14 years age group) who are out of school, almost twice the national average which itself is high compared to countries like Sri Lanka. So, Bihar has the smallest proportion of its kids attending schools but those who are attending are learning basic reading and calculating skills better than students in other states. Does this imply even though access to schools is a problem, the schools are comparatively better in Bihar? Not quite! In fact schools in Bihar are the worst with the highest student-teacher ratios and absenteeism (of both teachers and students) and poor basic infrastructure like teaching aids, classrooms, toilets etc. On an average, there are 68.2 students for every teacher in public schools of Bihar and 75 students are crammed in every classroom. For a comparison, conditions were better in the segregated schools for black kids of apartheid era south Africa . About half of all enrolled students and one-fourth of the teachers are not to be found in the schools on any given day and the drop-out rate is the highest in the country.

If this is so, then what explains relatively better performance of students in Bihar? I think students from Bihar do better in these tests because they are a select group of highly motovated kids. Indeed it takes a great deal of motivation from students to continiue studying when they are malnourished, their parents are illiterate, they do not have textbooks, their houses do not have electricity and they go to schools without classrooms or teachers[1].

For the high rate of ‘out of school’ kids, while the state aggregate is disappointing, there are large inter-district variations within the state. On one hand every third of fourth kid is out of school in Saharsa (26,1%), Sitamarhi (25,2%), Sheohar (25,1%) and Supaul (28,6%) and the situation is only marginally better in Araria (23,0%), Darbhanga (22,8%), Jamui (22,4%) and Kishanganj (23,3%). On the other hand districts like Begusarai (4,3%), Bhojpur (3,3%), Gopalganj (4,5%), Kaimur (4,0%), Rohtas (4,2%) and Vaishali (4,6%) have less than 5% of children who are not regularly attending schools.

Such inter-district variations are not unique to Bihar. Sharp variations can be observed even in the richer and more developed states like Punjab, Gujarat, Maharashtra and AP. But such large inter-district variation within Bihar still surprises me because sharp inter-regional differences of the kind that we find in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab, Haryana, Karnataka or AP is not seen in Bihar. Generally, south Bihar is a litte richer, specially, the Sone-command area and within poorer north Bihar, the Kosi belt is even more poor and remote. But the differences are nowhere like we come across when travelling from Panchmahal to Charottar in Gujarat or from Vidarbha to Marathwada in Maharashtra or from Telangana to coastal Andhra in AP.

This inter-district variation gives me hope, hope that we can ensure access to school for every kid even at low levels of income because i don’t think that rural per capita incomes are much higher in Gopalganj or in Muzaffarpur compared to Araria or Kishanganj. The same is true for administrative capacity and education system across districts also. This means that we don’t have to wait for a radical reforms in general administration and education system to ensure that all our kids attend schools and finsih 8 years of education. This also points out that poverty is not the only reason why kids are out of school. There are other determinants. Kosi belt turns out to be the worst. It is most severely affected by floods that rupture daily life for 3 months, displace people, force schools to be closed and cause severe transient poverty. All this must be discouraging students from continuing their studies. Another interesting thing that i noticed is that all the small new districts that were carved out during the Laloo regime are also poor performers. This indicates that these districts were underdeveloped pockets within the larger old districts from which they were carved out and thats why there was a popular demand for district status. But the popular hope of becoming a separate district leading to better development seems to have been frustrated.

I know very little about Bihar and all these hypotheses i am proposing above are rather uninformed guesses which may not be true at all. Now PRATHAM has uploaded district level data on its website for free download. It would be really useful if somebody takes this valuable data and does rigorous statistical modelling on factors associated with low/high drop-out rates and low/high levels of learnings in schools across the state. It will be a great policy input.

[1] More than half of Bihar’s kids are malnourished, two-third of women are illiterate, 94% households do not have electricity connections and more than 200,000 vacant posts of teachers in primary and secondary schools.