DOES RHETORIC ALWAYS MATCH REALITY? AN OVERVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL DECENTRALIZATION IN KERALA, INDIA
Kerala State, which lies on the most southwestern tip of India, is widely known for its innovative approaches to social development and education, and is regarded internationally as a model for development. This tiny state with a most advanced civil socie
- PDF / 103,154 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 454.205 x 679.807 pts Page_size
- 55 Downloads / 175 Views
1.
INTRODUCTION
Kerala State, which lies on the most southwestern tip of India, is widely known for its innovative approaches to social development and education, and is regarded internationally as a model for development. This tiny state with a most advanced civil society has been described as “a sort of Scandinavia of the Third World” (Tornquist, 2000, p. 118). The state has achieved universal primary education, near-universal literacy, and near gender equality in access to education. Kerala has received recognition for its history of social mobilization of education, health care, public distribution of food both at home and abroad, and for the many fundamental structural changes it has adopted, including land reforms. Yet paradoxically, Kerala has also been referred to as “a mystery inside a riddle inside an enigma” (Wallich, 1995, p. 37) because it has never succeeded in translating its human development indicators into economic ones (Mukundan & Bray, 2004). Kerala claims to have implemented far-reaching decentralized planning in numerous sectors, including education, through the 1996 introduction of the People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning (PCDP). This decentralization policy was much heralded by its political proponents as one of the most unique reform approaches ever introduced in the country (Isaac & Franke, 2000). One academic went so far as to describe it as “one of the most important recent experiments in generating alternatives to corporate dominated globalization” (Franke, 2002, p. 47). Under this decentralization project, local level self-governing bodies were delegated with powers to control basic education and were authorized to formulate and implement local level plans. In this chapter, I closely examine the impact of decentralization on the primary education sector of Kerala. Analyzing the particular socio-political, cultural, and economic contexts of Kerala, I explore the paradoxes and jeopardizing factors behind the decentralized reform process, focusing on the relationship between the creation of official legislation and the actual effects of implementation on governance. I commence with a brief description of the 1996 PCDP along with its perceived impacts in the field of education, and subsequently provide an analysis of the accountability and effectiveness of democratic decentralization. Noting the conceptual implications of the politics of democratic decentralization in Kerala, I conclude with insights related
177 Christopher Bjork (ed.), Educational Decentralization, 177–190. C 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
178
EDUCATIONAL DECENTRALIZATION
to the need for redefinition of the process of initiating and sustaining educational changes in a decentralized fashion in Kerala. 2.
THE PCDP AND EDUCATION SECTOR
In this section, I will describe the structure and philosophy of the PCDP, which has undergone a series of significant modifications since it was introduced. The Left Democratic Front (LDF) government that was in power in 1996 promoted the PCDP as a mechanism for
Data Loading...
