Rukmini Banerji - Director Programs and senior member of Pratham's national leadership team

On improvement in the projects.

Every year we try to improve our process. So there are two things, one is every year we have something common and second is something’s are added.

Like last year we did an English test. We did a test of children’s comprehension. This year we haven’t done that but we have collected information about households. Whether they live a Pakka house or Kachha household, whether they have livestock or phone.We have collected that.Every year one hand we try to do some new things and some old things, so that there is consistency and comparability. And we have done lot of things to improve the process. This year, four randomly selected villages in all districts have been rechecked. We extended our market trainers training. This year master trainers had four or five days in each state being trained in how to train. On the Data front, we have done something on the data management fund to improve it.

About ASER
The thing that I would like to say is on the basic design on ASER. The whole idea was we use a common set of tools and we use a common sampling strategy. But all these districts partners do the actual implementation at a district level. So we believe that it a useful and a very desirable aspect of ASER that it gets done by many different people.
But we all follow the common thing as far as comparability is possible.

As a district level because of constrains level of time and resources we have not being able to work consistently with districts partners over these four years to build up their capacity. This is something that we would like to do.
This year we have data already in for 564 districts and a few more will come in. We estimate that there are about 575 or so rural districts and I think we will reach probably 570 this year.

On governments initiative to universalise elementary education by 2010.

In terms of universal enrollment, the numbers are quite high, well above 95% now.
I think reaching of this goal is very difficult. You are already almost there. Now if you say universal elementary education, we feel that should include learning as well (learning satisfactorily). The ASER report shows that on the basic reading and arithmetic side we still have a long way to go.

About outstanding states in ASER.

Two main outstanding stories are Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. Here across the board in most of their districts you can see a big jump in basic learning between 2007-06. And over all in Bihar you see continued steep drop of the school children.

On the dissemination of the Data.

We really pay a lot of attention on how are we going to take this data to government as well as to the Panchayat. On that front the basic report as you see in the website. There are two-page versions of that, four page versions of that. Last year we did posters, pamphlets, and letters to Panchayat. We did all manner of dissemination material in different states in different strategies.

Now for example, one of my collogue called Usha Rane, she heads Pratham works in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Maharashtra. We made sure that the letters went to every Sarpanch indicating the basic results and also saying to look into their own village’s status.

The response that we got was very good, when you actually take the trouble to explain it to people, give them the tool, people often react very positively.