Acceptability Paradigm of Access to Primary Education: Evidences from Primary Data

Abstract

Education creates the human capital for the benefit of the society or for the country as a whole. While the quantitative expansion of the system appears to be very impressive, the achievement of the goal of universalisation of primary education has still remained elusive. This is because the government continues its celebration through reflecting on increased access to the infrastructural facilities, based on apparent increase in enrolment-ratios, literacy rate and number of schools; a deeper look reveals the progress to be grossly un-satisfactory. In this context, it is an urgent need to make education as accessible as possible to all the citizens of the country.

Although the issue of access has gathered much attention from the suppliers perspective yet the availability of quality education to the masses provided by teachers with right attitude is still infancy. So, true access remains imaginary unless the people who are entrusted with imparting education have the right attitude towards promoting participation of all social inter-sections of students.Whether the children would continue schooling or not depends upon numerous factors like, teacher’s responsibility and their unbiased attitude, personalised attention to weaker section students, continuous assessment of students, regularity of teachers, etc. If the providers do not accept their roles, all efforts of creating the facilities, making it affordable and motivating the beneficiaries would fail.

Keeping this in background, the present paper intends to measure the acceptability index showing the rural-urban variation in the attitude of teachers for which it uses data collected through a primary survey of six basic survey units- 4 villages and 2 wards from the Varanasi district of Uttar Pradesh.