Philippine E-Journals

Mapping of Elementary Educational Infrastructure in India: A State and District Level Analysis

Naresh Kumar | Vipan Kumar | Sapna Narula

Discipline: Education

 

Abstract:

Education plays an important role in a country’s development process. Indian education system comprises the elementary, secondary and tertiary levels. Over two decades India registered a significant growth in the educational infrastructure at tertiary level of education but elementary and secondary levels of education are struggling with low accessibility of infrastructure and resources. This is affecting the quality of education particularly at elementary level of education which is responsible for growth in secondary and tertiary education. The assessment of infrastructure across the country is very difficult due to regional inequalities and economic diversities. This paper is an attempt to map accessibility of infrastructure at elementary level of education at district and state level in India. For mapping and analysis, advance computation techniques like GIS and contour mapping techniques are used. A novel technique and algorithm was developed to represent the data in various formats in the qualitative way; to the knowledge of the authors this novel representation of data is hitherto unreported in the open literature. Analysis confirms that there are regional inequalities in the accessibility of required infrastructure and in some states the situation is pathetic despite various government initiatives.