group of villagers. Indeed, if, for example, they were the only three parents who were complaining about the quality of the teaching, while the rest of the parents seemed content, it is not clear that any action against the teacher would even be warranted. In other words, it seems likely that the VEC can only be effective when it reflects the collective will of a large group of engaged parents.

# **2.2 Practice**

In practice, although the VECs had been (statutorily) constituted in 2001 in every village, well before our study began, there is no evidence of parental involvement in the running of the public schools, either through the VEC or through other community or village mechanisms, based on a pre-intervention survey we conducted in 280 villages.

The survey included an interview of 1,029 VEC members (their names and addresses were provided by each school’s headmaster). The salient results from this survey are presented in table 1 (column 1). A striking fact is that only 38 percent of the VEC members interviewed mention the VEC spontaneously when asked the names of organizations they belong to, and 25 percent still say they are not members after being asked specifically if they are a member of the VEC. Only 26 percent of them have heard of the SSA, the government program from which the VEC derives its powers. Only 21 percent know that their committee is entitled to receive resources from the SSA (panel A). Most startlingly, only 3.6 percent mention the ability to request government funds to hire a Shiksha Mitra (an additional para-teacher) when the school is over-crowded as one of the VEC’s prerogatives (and responsibilities) (Panel D). Yet, this is probably the most important power they have, since this gives them not only an extra teacher, but an extra teacher they directly control (at least on paper).

Given the ignorance of the VEC members, themselves, it is not surprising that parents know even less about the VEC and its responsibilities. Column 1 in table 2 reports some summary statistics from parents’ responses to this survey. For example, household respondents were asked whether there was any committee in the village that dealt with issues relating to education. A startling 92 percent responded that they did not know of any such committee. Only 3 percent could name actual members of the VEC.<sup>8</sup> It is worth noting that ignorance and lack of participation in the institutions of local governance, is not just a problem for education. Only 14.2 percent of respondents report that a household member ever attended a Gram Sabha, village meetings that were institutionalized as part of a country-wide decentralization initiative in 1993. However, as panel C of table 2 shows, for the households that do participate in local governance, education seems to be a low priority. Of those who have attended any Gram Sabha, only 3.3 percent mention education when asked about which issues were covered in the last meeting. More generally, when parents were asked what they consider the most pressing issues in the village, education ranks fifth on the list of village problems, with just 13.1 percent of respondents mentioning it at all.

The baseline survey also found evidence that community members—parents, head teachers, and village leaders— do not know how bad things are in the village as far as education is concerned. The actual learning levels of all children between the ages of 7 and 14 from over 8,000 randomly selected households across our study villages were measured using tools developed by Pratham to rapidly assess whether a child can read, write, and do simple arithmetic **.** The results

> 8 Moreover, the proportion of people without any knowledge of VECs remains as high even when we look only at parents whose children are enrolled in government schools (Banerjee et. al. 2006, Figure 9).

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