Changing Framework of Local Governance and - Create

Changing Framework of Local Governance and Community Participation in Elementary EducationVECs is found to be quite low. Drawing evidence from different states, Ramachandran(2001:11) 29 states:While VECs have been formed in all the DPEP-I districts, evidence from the fieldsuggests that women’s participation is not uniformly effective.However, it was found that with more training opportunities access to adequate informationand NGO interventions, the participation of women could be increased resulting inconsiderable improvement in children’s particularly girls’ education. Participation of girls inschool increases if Mother Teacher Association is actively involved making schools moregender friendly and secured place for girls. Women’s participation became more effective inthe districts where the Mahila Samakhya Programme is being implemented (Ramachandran,2001:5) and in view of this, some states have established links with the ongoing MahilaSamakhya Programme. This programme is showing significant impacts on the education ofchildren, particularly girls 30 . For example, in Andhra Pradesh, AP Mahila Samata whichimplements the Mahila Samakhya Programme also implements the NPEGEL programme(started in 2003-04) to provide education to disadvantaged girls in 37 mandals in its projectareas while in other mandals it is implemented directly by SSA (Jandhyala, forthcoming).In view of the need to promote women’s participation and also the special roles of communityand teachers for this purpose, gender sensitization training has been integrated with VEC aswell as teacher training programmes. In addition, in many states, mothers have been motivatedto participate in the education of their children particularly girls since the initiation of theprogramme like DPEP.The programme strategy has had an overwhelming impact on girls’ enrolment,especially SC/ST girls. The parent and community now recognise the need and arewilling to send girls to school. With a conducive environment for girls’ educationcreated at the community level, girls’ enrolment has shown a significant upward trendin DPEP districts compared to non-DPEP districts (GoI, 2003:54).Community participation is now the hallmark of various educational programmes in the statesbut still there is a lot to do to ensure the effective participation of the community in school29 Ramachandran (2001) found that in Andhra Pradesh 50% of statutory school committee members werewomen. In Assam, it is less than 20%, in Gujarat two of nine VEC members are women and in HimachalPradesh, Haryana and Tamil Nadu 30 to 33% were women but in reality their actual participation in VECmeeting has been found much lower in many villages across the country.30 The evidence from a study conducted in Bihar (Janssens, van de Gaag and Gunning, 2004) strongly suggeststhe positive relationship between the Mahila Samakhya (MS) programme and increased individual andcommunity social capital. The findings strongly suggest a positive relationship with pre and primary schoolenrolment of not only of members, but of non-members as well of Mahila Samakhya Programme. The authorsstate: ‘Controlling for child, household and community characteristics, we find that children in programmevillages are significantly more likely to be enrolled in preschool. The number of preschools, itself stronglycorrelated with the presence of the programme, is highly predictive of enrolment. We also find a significant andadditional relationship between individual participation in the programme and preschool enrolment. Finally, theevidence suggests that children living in programme villages, whose mothers do not participate themselves, aresignificantly more likely to be enrolled as well. In short, the programme seems to have a direct relationship withpreschool enrolment. For primary school the findings are approximately similar. The main difference is that thespill-overs of the programme are much less visible. Only girls and children from the lowest castes seem tobenefit of the presence of the programme regardless of whether their mother participates herself’ (Janssens, Vande Gaag and Gunning, 2004).27