'Pariksha pe Charcha' can't hide stark indices on state of education: Kharge

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Saturday highlighted a government survey that showed poor learning outcomes among school students and questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi's flagship events such as 'Pariksha pe Charcha' and 'Exam Warriors'.

Kharge said such buzzwords and self-publicity events cannot whitewash the stark indices depicting the real state of education in India, and accused the government of apathy.

"Buzz words and self-publicity events like 'Pareeksha pe Charcha' and 'Exam Warriors' cannot whitewash these STARK indices depicting the REAL state of education in India! Rank apathy leading to falling learning outcomes. Modi government remains apathetic to our future," the Congress chief wrote in an X post.

Kharge also attached a video on the outcome of the survey — Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development (PARAKH) Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024 — conducted by the education ministry, to the post.

The video claimed that the "national learning crisis is worse than the pre-Covid era" and pointed to failures in the foundation course, and widening learning gaps at the middle and secondary levels. "Education neglected," the video alleged, claiming that "now we know the ill effects of reducing the education spending by half".

The PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan, formerly known as the National Achievement Survey, was conducted on 4 December last year, covering 21,15,022 students from both government and private schools in grades 3, 6 and 9 across 74,229 schools in 781 districts, spanning 36 states and Union Territories.

The survey found that only 55 per cent of class 3 students can arrange numbers up to 99 in ascending or descending order and only 58 per cent can perform addition and subtraction of two-digit numbers.

It found that only 53 per cent of class 6 students could understand and visualise arithmetic operations and their correlations, knew addition and multiplication tables at least up to 10, and could apply the four basic operations on whole numbers to solve daily life problems.

In class 6, an additional subject, 'The World Around Us' — which covers environment and society — was introduced alongside Language and Mathematics. Students scored the lowest in Mathematics (46 per cent), while Language averaged 57 per cent and The World Around Us scored 49 per cent nationally.

According to education ministry officials, instances where less than 50 per cent of students were able to answer correctly indicated learning gaps.