(This was written three years ago)
In the first instance the MC was facing a situation where the children even after reaching the seventh or eighth were in no position to read or do basic mathematics. The problem as identified by the MC was that the teachers were not teaching properly. They were not present in schools most of the time, they were not ensuring attendance of children in the classes by meeting the parents and a host of other such complaints against the teacher. In order to improve the performance of teacher it was decided that the incentive structure had to be modified. The idea was to conduct a test of children of a particular class. The performance of the children in the test would be used as a proxy indicator of teacher performance for that particular class. (Most classes have just one teacher) With this measure rank all the teachers under the AMC and then structure their incentives accordingly. This was expected to improve the teacher performance in the schools run by AMC. On the face of it, this sounds as a very pragmatic solution. The proponents of this solution were driven by the philosophy of ‘we are in a crisis; we must do something; doing something is better than doing nothing’.
The problem with the whole idea in above case is that the solution is based on a very rudimentary understanding of the problem of teacher performance. Their rationale for the structuring of incentives is that ‘that is the way it works in corporate world; perform or perish. We want the same system in our schools’. Now do you seriously think that successful corporates are run that way. There is a whole HR department which focuses on performance of employees. The employees are selected through a rigorous procedure; they are given sufficient training and learning opportunities through out their career, sufficient opportunities for career growth and above all decent pay and adequate support systems. It is after putting in place a whole environment where performance is possible that employees are expected to perform or perish in a corporate organizations. Where ever these perform or perish idea is pursued without putting in places processes and systems to aid performance, failure has been the result invariably. Now coming to the case of government teachers, in all these facets of HR there are serious deficiencies. Teaching as a profession does not attract the best of talent because it does not pay well and nowadays does not have much of a social status. (Some matrimonial ads say that teachers need not apply). But arguably you don’t need that kind of talent. (I have serious reservations about the usage of the concept of talent and also about calling some one less talented. But that is besides the point here and I will not dwell upon it). There is no prospect for teachers to grow in a career, the training that is normally given to teachers is pathetic and the kind of duties that they are expected to perform including things like election duties and the like puts a lot of pressure on them. Now in this kind of environment if you expect the teachers to perform, you got to be talking through your hat. But the solution that was proposed by AMC people is very attractive to people as it closely resembles the visible part of corporate HR. People are ignorant of those finer invisible points of corporate HR. This solution if implemented is only going to worsen the situation further for the same reasons as to why such half-baked ideas don’t work in corporates. I don’t want to go into the details of improving teacher performance. My only intention here is to highlight the dangers of ‘doing something as it is better than doing nothing’. It is critical to have a deep understanding of the issues before looking at applying correctives.
Coming to the second instance. There have been a few cases of malnutrition deaths of children in Mumbai recently. A few cases of malnutrition death points to thousands of cases of malnutrition affected children. Now the deaths took place among some tribal communities living the suburbs of Mumbai. The journalist in the article came up with solutions for the problem. The solutions proposed were
Introduce a cess tax on the lines of education cess tax on petrol in hotels and restaurants. Use the proceeds of the tax to provide food in the malnutrition affection regions
Excess food in parties be diverted to malnutrition areas
The solutions again sound fine. But again the issue is there is a very inadequate understanding of the problem of malnutrition. Malnutrition is not about not having adequate food. The seeds of malnutrition are sowed in the wombs of the mother. It is essential that mothers be given sufficient care and attention during the pregnancy stage to tackle malnutrition. Again issues like sanitation, access to clean drinking water and protection from very much preventable diseases like diarrhea, cholera and the like are critical to preventing malnutrition. Now in our cases these things are taken care of because of factors like our wealth, our ability to negotiate with the government and our education. These three factors are unavailable to the poor and there is a total systemic failure in delivery of services to them. There is a total breakdown of the systems in the areas where these poor people live and it is manifested in the lack of sanitation, lack of health care facilities, inadequate shelter and lack of access to safe drinking water.
Now you might very well ask, the above listed efforts will add to the overall efforts to solve the problem. It wont damage the efforts. I will argue that it will damage. This is an opinion that came in a leading newspaper. This will contribute to formation of a public opinion and also inform the policy of the public systems to some extent because the people in the public systems are not inured to the discourses taking place in the public. Now imagine if the resources of the public systems in terms of time, effort and money are invested in solutions of this nature. It will be like throwing money down the drain and the problem will remain unaddressed in spite of the ‘best efforts of the government’. We are not exactly resource rich to waste resources. Each penny has to be invested with a lot of thought. Now lets say the article did not appear in the newspaper at all. Some politician decided to address the issue. To him also, if he does not engage sufficiently with the problem, such solutions would occur easily with the same disastrous consequences. If you think they would consult doctors and health officials you got to do a rethink. They will dismiss the experts in these areas as ‘people who talk too much’ and do nothing.
