New Delhi: India’s rural-urban divide extends to education as well, including expenditure on education and access to digital resources, reveals the latest nationwide survey conducted by the the National Statistics Office (NSO) titled ‘Household Social Consumption: Education’.
The survey, which was released last week, mapped 1.52 lakh students in 1.13 lakh households, spread across 8,000 villages and 6,000 urban blocks between July 2017 and June 2018.
It reveals a huge gap in the expenditure on education between rural and urban areas, especially for schools.
A student’s education up until higher secondary, on an average, costs a rural household Rs 28,157 but for an urban household it is a whopping Rs 84,712.
A possible reason for the disparity in expenditure on education could be the preference of private schools over government ones. According to the survey, 76.1 per cent of students from rural households attend primary and middle schools run by the government as opposed to a meagre 38 per cent of students from urban houses.
However, the gap becomes much smaller when it comes to graduates and above, with 49.7 per cent rural and 41 per cent urban students opting to study in government institutions.
We are deeply grateful to our readers & viewers for their time, trust and subscriptions.
Quality journalism is expensive and needs readers to pay for it. Your support will define our work and ThePrint’s future.
Digital divide, drop-out rate and access to schools
This gap extends to the digital divide in education as well. In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, where most schools are resorting to the online mode of education, this data becomes especially significant.
Just 4 per cent of the rural households have access to computers, compared to 23 per cent of urban households. Moreover, 14.9 per cent of rural and 42 per cent of urban households have internet access.
These survey also looks at the proportion of people who can operate technology. In rural households, 9.9 per cent students are able to operate a computer, 13 per cent are able to use the internet and 10.8 per cent have used the internet in the past 30 days.
The numbers for urban households, for the same parameters, stand at 32.4 per cent, 37.1 per cent and 33.8 per cent, respectively.
Within this, gender disparity exists as well, with rural female being the lowest percentage in all three aspects — 7 per cent, 8.5 per cent and 6.6 per cent respectively — and urban male being the highest — 37.5 per cent, 43.5 per cent and 40.4 per cent respectively.
However, the survey reveals that the proportion of students who complete their secondary school education is almost at par between rural and urban households. The survey notes that 15 per cent students complete their education while in urban households, 19 per cent do so.
A significant proportion of rural and urban households also have access to primary schools. According to the survey, 92.7 per cent of the rural households had a primary school in their 1 km radius as opposed to 87.2 per cent for urban households.
However, this is not true for secondary schools. Only 38 per cent of rural households have a secondary school in their 1 km radius, compared to urban households’ 70 per cent.
The survey notes that the dropout rate in both rural and urban areas were significant, especially for the upper primary and secondary school levels. It stood at 18 and 20 per cent respectively for rural, and 15 and 17 per cent for urban.
Subscribe to our channels on YouTube & Telegram
News media is in a crisis & only you can fix it
You are reading this because you value good, intelligent and objective journalism. We thank you for your time and your trust.
You also know that the news media is facing an unprecedented crisis. It is likely that you are also hearing of the brutal layoffs and pay-cuts hitting the industry. There are many reasons why the media’s economics is broken. But a big one is that good people are not yet paying enough for good journalism.
We have a newsroom filled with talented young reporters. We also have the country’s most robust editing and fact-checking team, finest news photographers and video professionals. We are building India’s most ambitious and energetic news platform. And we aren’t even three yet.
At ThePrint, we invest in quality journalists. We pay them fairly and on time even in this difficult period. As you may have noticed, we do not flinch from spending whatever it takes to make sure our reporters reach where the story is. Our stellar coronavirus coverage is a good example. You can check some of it here.
This comes with a sizable cost. For us to continue bringing quality journalism, we need readers like you to pay for it. Because the advertising market is broken too.
If you think we deserve your support, do join us in this endeavour to strengthen fair, free, courageous, and questioning journalism, please click on the link below. Your support will define our journalism, and ThePrint’s future. It will take just a few seconds of your time.