Insights from two educational reports
By - Moa Jamir
Two recent national reports on school education present a mixed picture for Nagaland, highlighting both progress and areas requiring further scrutiny. While certain positive trends indicate improvement, some divergent outcomes call for a deeper investigation.
A key positive development is the decline in the secondary school dropout rate, which, for the first time, has fallen below the national average. According to the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2023-24, Nagaland recorded a secondary dropout rate of 11.6%, compared to the national average of 13.8%. This represents a significant improvement over previous years. In 2018-19, the dropout rate stood at 24.1%, steadily declining to 19.4% in 2022-23 before reaching the current level.
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024 also supports this trend. It found that 12.6% of adolescents (aged 15-16) in rural Nagaland were classified as ‘not in school’—a category that includes those who never enrolled or dropped out. Another noteworthy insight from ASER 2024 is that rural adolescents in Nagaland demonstrated higher digital literacy than their national counterparts.
However, one of the more curious findings relates to enrolment trends. The ASER report showed a low ‘not in school’ rate of just 1.6% for children aged 6-14 years in Nagaland, slightly below the national average of 1.9%. Yet, UDISE+ data points to a significant decline in overall student enrolment across the state over the past decade. According to UDISE+, over 100,000 fewer students were enrolled in schools in Nagaland compared to ten years ago. The most recent year-on-year decline (from 2022-23 to 2023-24) was smaller but still notable, with enrolment dropping from 415,655 to 412,975—or by 2,680 students.
While UDISE+ does not have a ‘not in school’ parameter, it does provide insights through the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), which measures the proportion of students enrolled at each education level as a percentage of the official age-group population. In 2023-24, Nagaland’s GER at the primary level (Classes 1-5) was 94, slightly above the national average of 93. However, the GER showed a sharp decline, thereafter. At the upper primary level (Classes 6-8), it fell to 72, the second lowest in India while the national average was 90. At the secondary level (Classes 9-10), Nagaland recorded a GER of 46, again the second lowest and well below the national average of 77. The age group from upper primary level is 11-13 years, while secondary starts at 14.
What explains this outcome? Evidently, both are based on the same baseline for calculations, with the UDISE+ using the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s Report of the Expert Group on Population Projection, June 2020, based on the 2011 Census data, while the ASER report incorporates the same as the basis for sampling. Besides, the ASER report is based on rural area, where enrolment tends to be lower than its urban counterpart.
It must also be noted that while ASER data is collected through ground surveys in villages, UDISE+ data is gathered from schools via entries into a designated portal and is assumed to provide a real-time reflection of enrolment trends.
Accordingly, are the discrepancies due to ASER being a household-based survey while UDISE+ is school-based? Could there be an error in population estimates, with higher projections not accurately reflecting the ground reality? Is the variation due to differences in rural and urban enrolment patterns? Could population projections be overestimating the number of school-age children, making enrolment ratios appear lower than they actually are?
The divergence in findings warrants critical analysis. Apart from remedying the dropout rates at the secondary level, this is imperative to ensure more comparable data and effective policy implementation.
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