The Background and the Motivation

The major departure of this book is its approach to estimating technical efficiency (TE) for primary and upper primary education which does not use a single frontier encompassing all the twenty-eight states and seven union territories (UT) over the period 2005–06 to 2010–11, as is done in the available literature. Rather, this method assumes that General Category State (GCS), Special Category States (SCS)&UT are not homogeneous and operate under different fiscal and economic conditions and hence the maximum educational-output producible from an input bundle by a school within a particular group may not be as high as what could be produced if the school could choose to locate in other group. This justifies construction of two group frontiers: (i) for GCS only and (ii) for SCS&UT. The non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has been used for estimation of TE to see whether in India the schools in different states are technically efficient in the sense that they are generating maximum educational output given the existing resources. The extent of underutilization of different inputs is also estimated. The book also investigates whether the States/UT with high literacy rate and or high educational development index (EDI) are also the States/UT with high technical efficiency. The factors influencing such efficiency are explained separately for the four groups: GCS-primary, GCS upper-primary; SCS&UT-primary and SCS&UT-upper primary highlighting some policy suggestions for improving efficiency. This chapter reports the basic motivation, objectives and the chapter composition of the book.