World Bank approves $500 mn education project for six states

The World Bank has recently approved a project worth $500 million to improve the learning outcome and governance of government schools in six Indian states through the project STARS.

About STARS Project

• The project, Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States Program (STARS), will be implemented through the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (a flagship central scheme).

Coverage

• The six states included in the project are Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, and Rajasthan.
• More than 52% of children in government-run schools in the six project states belong to vulnerable sections, such as Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and minority communities.

Benefits:

• It will help improve the learning assessment systems, strengthen classroom instruction and remediation, facilitate school-to-work transition, and strengthen governance and decentralized management.
• STARS will aid India’s response by strengthening implementation at the local level, investing in teacher capacity and ensuring that no child of any background is left behind from the right to education

Background

• STARS build on the partnership between India and the World Bank since 1994 for strengthening the school education system and to support the goal of providing education to all.
• Before STARS, the World Bank had aided of over $3 billion towards this.

About Samagra Shiksha

• Samagra Shiksha is an integrated scheme for school education, extending from pre-school to class XII to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education at all levels of school education.

It subsumes the three Schemes:

Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA)

Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA)

Teacher Education (TE)

The Scheme treats school education holistically as a continuum from Pre-school to Class 12.

The main emphasis of the Scheme is on improving the quality of school education by focussing on the two T’s – Teacher and Technology.

UPSC