A friend of mine recently pointed me towards an incredible resource. It’s called the Annual Status of Education Report (or ASER, which means impact in Hindi). ASER is an ambitious survey of the state of Indian rural education, conducted yearly since 2005, and their 2011 report came out a few days ago.

The level of organization here is truly impressive. It’s the largest survey conducted outside the government, combining the efforts of over 25,000 young volunteers from local organizations. Together, they survey nearly 300,000 households in over 16,000 villages in all states of India, and conduct basic level reading and numeracy tests on over 700,000 children.

Behind this coordinated effort is a simple and powerful idea, that effective policy needs to be based on evidence. The report takes a refreshingly no-nonsense approach. Rather than starting off with a long list of dignitaries to thank and lofty goals to implement, ASER gets right down to the point, with figures and tables. They focus on two basic goals. How many children are enrolled in schools (and what kind of school)? And are these children learning the very basics of reading and numeracy? By comparing trends of schooling and learning in different states, they have put together the most detailed picture so far of what’s working and what isn’t in rural education. The general picture that is emerging is one of rising enrollment but declining learning outcomes, from levels that were already low.

So let’s get down to the data. While reading through the report, some surprising facts and numbers jumped out at me.

More kids are going to school than ever before. Among 6 to 14 year olds in rural India, 97% are attending school. The toughest demographic to keep in school is 11 to 14 year-old girls, and even here the numbers are improving. Attendance in this age range has gone up from 90% to 95%. This is a remarkable achievement, and a necessary first step towards a right to education.

Over a quarter of these children are now enrolled in private schools. With the new Right to Education Act, government schools are now free and, according to the statistics, are performing better than rural private schools. Nonetheless, private school education is on the rise, suggesting that there is still not enough access to the government school network.

Teachers are attending school regularly. Their attendance is at 87% (on the day of the survey). Gujarat is doing particularly well with 96% of teachers attending, and ten states have greater than 90% teacher attendance. However, as these results are based on a single day of measurement, you should take them with a grain of salt.

But the students aren’t. Student attendance is at 71%, a number that has dropped in the last four years. Some states have dropped over 10 percent here. Bihar is at the bottom of the list here, with 50% student attendance.

A quarter of all students are attending school in a language they don’t speak at home.

Half of all rural schools do not have a functioning toilet. Nearly a quarter do not have separate girls toilets. A quarter do not have access to drinking water. Adequate drinking water and functioning, separate toilets for boys and girls are now a mandated requirement by the Right to Education Act that came into effect in 2010.

More than half of students in the fifth grade can’t read at second grade level. Similar statistics arise for basic math levels. The ability to read complete sentences or add and subtract numbers is not a very ambitious standard for learning, and Indian schools are failing to achieve even this.

What’s more, the math and reading levels are falling further. Learning outcomes have fallen over the last six years. Some states have dropped by over 10 percent in the last year alone.

What could be causing this drastic decline? The study points to certain problem areas. For one thing, the number of classrooms that cater to more than one grade level is on the rise. In some of the problem states, teacher and student attendance is also falling. Also, 2011 was the year the Indian census was conducted, which meant that teachers were pulled out of school to conduct surveys. Neither of these factors can individually be held responsible for the trend, but taken together they build a story of educational decline.

Take the case of Punjab and Haryana. These neighboring states share a capital, are matched in student and teacher attendance, in private school enrollment, and in numbers of classrooms that host students of multiple grades. Yet they are moving in opposite directions. Every year, the Punjab schooling system is becoming more effective in converting non-readers into readers, whereas the opposite is true in Haryana. The report argues that part of this difference may be explained by a three-year program taken on by Punjab to improve levels of reading and numeracy.

Similarly, consider the situation in Madhya Pradesh. It was improving in teaching effectiveness until 2008, after which learning levels took a precipitous fall. Some of this must have to do with the lower levels of student and teacher attendance, and a higher number of classrooms that cater to multiple grades. But what explains the initial rise? In 2005-2006, and again in 2007-2008, the state launched focused campaigns to improve reading and basic literacy, which could have had a positive impact.

The ASER findings highlight the failings of the current system, and they point towards areas where the central and state governments need to take action.

Perhaps the saddest picture emerges in a short article that summarizes the state of affairs, written by Lant Pritchett, a professor of International Development at Harvard Kennedy school. He imagines the trajectory of a young boy or girl who has just enrolled into school. What can the numbers tell us about the likely fate of this child? The numbers he presents are from the 2010 data, so I repeated the same calculation for the latest data. The following table summarizes the fate of this young child, in a nutshell (explained below).

This table tells a heart-breaking story. Here is how it works. The second column tells you the percentage of students who can read at second grade level. The next column shows the improvement in this number, for every year of schooling. This is the fraction of students who are learning to read in every grade (the gain from grade to grade). For example, by the end of the third grade, 10.1% more of the students can now read a basic text.

Using this data, you can then ask the following question. If you come into a grade not knowing how to read, what are the odds that you still won’t be able to read at the end of the year? This is the number presented in the last column [1]. It measures the failure of the schools to bring a child to literacy. The larger this number, the more likely it is that a child who is left behind will stay behind. For example, of the children who enter the fourth grade not knowing how to read, 81% will not gain literacy that year. 

Now imagine the plight of our hopeful student, who has just joined the second grade, without knowing how to read. It is pretty much a given that they will not learn how to read in the second grade (94% odds). In the third grade, 9 out of 10 students will not learn how to read. In the fourth grade, 8 out of 10. The Right to Education Act mandates that students should not repeat a year. So every year, this child is promoted onwards, with the hope that somebody else will notice and help. But year after year, the odds are stacked firmly against them. Lant Pritchett describes the outcome:

“The result is that you could easily be one of the one in three children who complete lower primary schooling, passed through five entire years of schooling, having spent roughly 5,000 hours in school, still lacking the most fundamental of skills. And so, year after year, a dream deferred becomes a dream denied.”

References:

ASER center, Pratham (2011). Annual Status of Education Report (Rural), 2011 Survey Results

You can query the ASER data from all years, and download the annual reports.

[1] The formula to calculate this is  100-((gain from previous grade)/(100-fraction that could read in previous grade))*100

Image Credit: Royd Tauro

Indians today can hardly recall the last time that they saw a vulture. In the 1990s, these majestic birds were a common sight in the subcontinent, and would show up wherever there was exposed carrion. As a child, I remember marveling at vultures circling at impressive heights, probably looking back down at me with their incredible eyesight, their wings outstretched as they effortlessly hovered on columns of warm air.

But since the nineties, their numbers have been falling dramatically in India, Pakistan and Nepal. The scale is astonishing – for every thousand white-rumped vultures in 1990, only one is alive today. A similarly sad story holds for the Indian vulture and the slender-billed vulture. Together, all three Asian vultures are now listed as being critically endangered.

So what’s going on? It’s not that they are being hunted. For one thing, the killing of all wild animals in banned in India. But also, vultures have always provided a much valued ecological service. Most villagers dispose of dead animals by dumping the carrion. And they rely on the vultures to clean up.

Vultures have an undeservedly bad reputation. Because we associate carrion with disease, people believed that vultures spread diseases. But in fact, we now know that the opposite is true. Their powerfully corrosive stomach acids allow them to safely digest carrion that would be lethal to other scavengers, wiping out bacteria that can cause diseases like botulism and anthrax. They are the purgers of death and disease.

In their absence, populations of feral dogs have exploded, bringing with them the threat of rabies and human attacks. And if rats follow suit, India would face a new public health nightmare as it tries to control the spread of rodent-borne diseases like bubonic plague [1].

The absence of vultures is also having a cultural impact. The Zoroastrian Parsis in India have long maintained a tradition of sky burials. They leave their dead out on platforms for the vultures to consume, in order to avoid defiling earth, water, and fire with what they consider to be an unholy corpse [1]. These towers of silence, as they are known, would once attract many hundreds of vultures. Now they are eerily empty, forcing the Parsis to find new ways to deal with their dead.

So what is causing the mysterious collapse (often literally so) of vulture populations? It’s a daunting puzzle to solve, and in 2003 an international collaboration of scientists stepped up to the challenge. Their work [2] was supported by the US-based Peregrine fund and in collaboration with the Ornithological society of Pakistan. They discovered that most the dead vultures had pasty chalk-like deposits of uric acid crystals on their internal organs. This is a terrible disease called visceral gout, and is a sign of kidney failure.

But what was causing the kidney failure?

To solve this, the authors systematically began to rule out possible explanations, in a manner that would make an episode of CSI look like child’s play. They established that it wasn’t pesticides or heavy metal poisoning, nor nutritional deficiency or a bacterial or viral infection. Instead, they found that the occurrence of kidney failure was correlated with the presence of a single chemical called diclofenac. Within a few days of consuming contaminated carrion, the vultures would fall sick, begin to droop their necks severely, and then collapse. Sometimes they would fall right out of their perches.

In essence, we were unintentionally poisoning the vultures. Diclofenac is an anti-inflammatory drug that is used by livestock farmers in India to treat their cattle and water buffaloes. Studies have since identified a vulture-safe alternative. In a last ditch move to rescue the vultures, the India’s National Board for Wildlife recommended a ban on diclofenac in 2005. A year later, this resulted in a manufacturing ban on diclofenac for veterinary use, and it was two more years before it was made an imprisonable offense to produce, sell or use this drug for veterinary purposes in 2008. All the while the vulture numbers had been falling steadily.

So how effective has this ban been in rebuilding the vulture populations? This question was addressed by another international collaboration, in a study [3] published last week. This work was led by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the UK, and the researchers hailed from institutes in the UK, Spain, and from wildlife conservation societies in India. They measured the concentration of diclofenac in 4500 liver samples from 21 locations across India, taken from carcasses before and after the ban on diclofenac.

Here’s what they found. When comparing 2004 (pre-ban) to 2008 (post-ban), the percentage of samples that were contaminated went down from 10.1% to 5.6%. The concentration of diclofenac in these contaminated carcasses had also gone down, by about a factor of 2.

The next question is, what does this mean for the vultures? Is this enough of a drop in contamination for them to start making a comeback? This is a tricky question because of the limited data and the many source of errors involved. The aim of this paper was to answer it.

They combined their measurements with available numbers for how much meat the average vulture eats, and how poisonous this chemical is to them. After a careful statistical analysis, they were able to estimate the overall effect on the white-rumped vultures. What they found is that in 2004, every meal that a vulture would eat had about a 1% chance of killing it. In 2006, this reduced to a quarter of a percent chance of death, per meal. Vultures eat about every 2-3 days, so over the course of the year these percentages begin to multiply.

Finally, the researchers plugged these numbers into a simulation to work out the rate at which the vultures are dying. In 2004, their results indicated that 80% of vultures were dying every year. By 2006, about 28% to 33% of them are dying every year. So the annual death rate has gone down to more than half what it was before the ban. They extrapolate that the death rate in 2007-2008 should be about 18%. Put another way, these odds amount to every vulture having to play an annual game of Russian roulette. And these are birds that are already critically endangered.

While the drop in death rates is encouraging, the researchers remained unconvinced that enough is being done to rescue the vultures. The fact that carcasses were contaminated well after the ban points to illegal use of diclofenac. For a critically endangered population, losing more than a sixth of your numbers every year is too heavy a toll to bear. In order for the vultures to stand a chance, the government still needs to focus its efforts on a stronger enforcement of the ban, as well as take on further conservation measures in parallel.

The story of the declining vultures is yet another reminder that ecosystems are fragile, interconnected and delicately balanced. Destroying a species can affect our own health, our environment, and even our culture in ways that are near impossible to predict.

If vultures vanish from the Indian subcontinent, it would certainly adversely affect the lives of its human inhabitants. We can try to put a dollar value on what the loss would cost us. Such cost versus benefit type of calculations can make a compelling case for rescuing endangered species and maintaining biodiversity.

Yet I have always felt that they miss an important part of the picture. There is another reason that we should value the vultures, that has less to do with economics and more to do with ethics. That reason is this: in our negligence, we would be responsible for the loss of these majestic birds, as well as the 3.5 billion years of evolutionary baggage that they have carried with them. And I’m not sure that we can put a price on that.

References

[1] Gross L (2006). Switching drugs for livestock may help save critically endangered Asian vultures. PLoS biology, 4 (3) PMID: 20076536

[2] Oaks JL, Gilbert M, Virani MZ, Watson RT, Meteyer CU, Rideout BA, Shivaprasad HL, Ahmed S, Chaudhry MJ, Arshad M, Mahmood S, Ali A, & Khan AA (2004). Diclofenac residues as the cause of vulture population decline in Pakistan. Nature, 427 (6975), 630-3 PMID: 14745453

[3] Cuthbert, R., Taggart, M., Prakash, V., Saini, M., Swarup, D., Upreti, S., Mateo, R., Chakraborty, S., Deori, P., & Green, R. (2011). Effectiveness of Action in India to Reduce Exposure of Gyps Vultures to the Toxic Veterinary Drug Diclofenac PLoS ONE, 6 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019069

Image Credits

The header image is of an Indian vulture, courtesy B V Madhukar. The two images of the White-rumped vulture are taken by Umang Dutt. All three images are shared under the Creative Commons License.

The image of the Parsi Tower of Silence and the Vulture distribution map are from the Wikipedia Commons.