Editorial on increasing the class strength
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Corruption is an issue which adversely affects India's economy of central, state and local government agencies. Not only has it held the economy back from reaching new heights, but rampant corruption has stunted the country's development.[1] A study conducted by Transparency International in 2005 recorded that more than 62% of Indians had at some point or another paid a bribe to a public official to get a job done.[2][3] In 2008, another report showed that about 50% of Indians had first hand experience of paying bribes or using contacts to get services performed by public offices, however, in 2018 their Corruption Perception Index ranked the country 78th place out of 180, reflecting steady decline in perception of corruption among people.[4][5]
The largest contributors to corruption are entitlement programs and social spending schemes enacted by the Indian government. Examples include the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the National Rural Health Mission.[6][7] Other areas of corruption include India's trucking industry which is forced to pay billions of rupees in bribes annually to numerous regulatory and police stops on interstate highways.[8]
The media has widely published allegations of corrupt Indian citizens stashing millions of rupees in Swiss banks. Swiss authorities denied these allegations, which were later proven in 2015–2016. The Indian media is largely controlled by extremely corrupt politicians and industrialists who play a major role by misleading the public with incorrect information and use the media for mud-slinging at political and business opponents.[9][10]
The causes of corruption in India include excessive regulations, complicated tax and licensing systems, numerous government departments with opaque bureaucracy and discretionary powers, monopoly of government controlled institutions on certain goods and services delivery, and the lack of transparent laws and processes.[11][12] There are significant variations in the level of corruption and in the government's efforts to reduce corruption across different areas of India.
'Teaching & Learning' is a weekly column on education and related subjects.
Apart from the infrastructure and the quality of teaching, the strength of the class is an important factor to be considered while evaluating a school. The attention that a student gets to a large extent depends on the student-teacher ratio, which in any ideal elementary class should be 25-30:1 — the formative years of learning.
The Right to Education (RTE) Act also a student-teacher ratio of 30:1. However, economics does not allow many schools to stick to a number or bring in any innovation due to the rigid classroom size.