It is the tenth year of ASER – where did the time go? As usual, we’ve all been in the office, trying to beat the January release deadline. But this year, because of the tenth year anniversary, there is more excitement, more frenetic activity and, of course, more work, to bring out not 1, not 2, but 3 reports! But, as always, the confidence is there that somehow it will all come together; maybe a foolhardy attitude to have, but, as we have learned in the last ten, it’s best not to delve too much….
Thinking back to 2005, there are so many memories… memories of all the wonderful people I have met in the last ten years, memories of funny-sad moments, memories of tension-filled nights, memories of fun-filled days. It is difficult to pick one or even just a few to share, but here are a few:
Bitten off more than we could chew?
The idea of ASER was conceived in the beginning of October 2005, we had our National Workshop in Bhopal at the end of October and the report was released on January 17, 2006. Between the end of October and beginning of December, partners had to be found in each district; master trainers had to be shortlisted and trained; volunteers had to be trained and the survey completed. After that, the data had to be entered and compiled, so that the analysis could be done. All of this had to ready and complete so that the report could be sent to the printer at least a week before the release. Had we “bitten off more than we could chew” as one eminent economist asked me?
The Queen of Dummy Tables:
Christmas, 25 December 2005. Three weeks from the report’s release. Madhav, Rukmini and I are sitting in my home and we have compiled data for Maharashtra… and that’s it; we don’t have data from anywhere else! And we’re wondering what the report should look like; we just didn’t know, because we had nothing to compare our numbers with. How do you know how good or bad your data is? You have to have something in your data set, which you can compare with secondary sources. There was no information on learning outcomes available in the public domain in 2005. We knew that the situation was not good – this was apparent in areas where Pratham was working. But, with ASER, we wanted estimates for every rural district of India, every state in the country and national estimates for the country as a whole. ASER has always collected information on enrollment and out-of-school status of children. Information on these is also available from many government sources. When the data started coming in, our estimates compared very well with other official estimates of enrollment and percentage of out-of-school children. That gave us a lot of confidence in our approach.
But that Christmas day in 2005, we didn’t have a clue, we had data for only one state, Rukmini was making dummy tables with no data in them, we were trying to visualise what the report would look like, what the overall picture would be, what findings we would present… but we had no data as yet. So, the discussion we were having was completely theoretical, with no evidence to back it up. But, Rukmini wanted the dummy tables ready. To this day, she is the one who makes the first round of dummy tables for the report – she is the Queen of Dummy Tables! I remember we gave up at some point, and opened a bottle of wine and called in some food to celebrate Christmas. Three weeks later, the first ASER report was released.
When Sudhakar disappeared for a day:
In 2005, at the central level, the data crunching team comprised Sudhakar, Pranav, Rukmini and I. I had just met Sudhakar and Pranav, who were Pratham old-timers. They were responsible for collating all the ASER data being entered across the country. Since, the ASER reading test is done in 16 regional languages, the data entry is done in several regional hubs. At the end of each day, data is uploaded from each hub to a central location where it is collated into one database. I remember sitting down with Sudhakar to plan the process and how I wanted it organised and in what form the data should be finally made available for analysis. I remember that I was quite forceful in pointing out how one had to be very, very careful working with large data and how one minor mistake could have a cascading effect. Also, given the time constraint, if everything was not done perfectly, we would never be able to bring out the report in time. This talk happened around noon one day in November.
After lunch, Sudhakar was nowhere to be found.
Not unusual…. perhaps he had an errand to run. No sign of him in the evening… I remember I was starting to get upset since there was so much to do and I’m thinking, ‘How can this boy just take off like that?’! By late evening, we were beginning to get worried. No one knew where he was nor had anyone heard from him. This was unusual. Rukmini asked me what I had said to him, whether I had shouted at him for any reason; she told me that he is a sensitive young man, that I may have traumatised him for life… I had no idea of what I could have said to have upset him so. I barely knew him and thought I was having a professional chat with him.
The next afternoon, Sudhakar appeared as if nothing had happened and rearing to go. It turned out that he had gone to visit his sister in Noida and clear his head! What a relief it was to see him! To this day Rukmini teases both of us.
When Shailendra and I went to train in Ladakh:
Pratham was given the job of finding partners in each state to do the survey. In states where we didn’t have a large presence, people were sent from other states to find partners who could give us volunteers; often, our people ended up being master trainers themselves. I remember the team from Gujarat went to Kerala to make contact with NGO organisations there! People were moving around the country; many till today say that ASER gave them the opportunity for a real ’Bharat darshan‘! Nobody was spared… Saleem and Rahul, from the Delhi office, were sent off on their motorcycles to do the survey in dacoit-infested areas of UP where no partner organisation was willing to go.
I remember, it was the last week of November. The survey was winding down in most states, the data had started to reach the data entry hubs and we still had no partner in Ladakh and Kargil. I don’t remember who it was, but someone found SECMOL (Student’s Education and Cultural Movement of Ladakh), who agreed to conduct the survey in Ladakh. But someone needed to go and train them on December 1, 2005. No one was in Delhi and, more importantly, no one was free. I was elected to go and do the job. I was told that Shailendra Sharma of Pratham would go with me and he would carry on to Kargil after the one-day training.
I had never met Shailendra before; all I knew was that he worked in the Delhi office of Pratham. I tried calling him all day, on November 30, to coordinate the early morning flight the next day. No response. I finally heard from him around 9pm, but he had no information on where the SECMOL campus was or what the plan was… I had never worked with Pratham people before and found this completely blasé attitude very odd. Today, I have been indoctrinated, but 10 years ago, I was a newbie to how Pratham works. We met at the airport at some godforsaken hour and took off for Ladakh on December 1, 2005.
We had been told that we would need a day to acclimatise, but there was no time for that. We arrived at the SECMOL campus just outside Ladakh and discovered that it is a completely green campus. Everything was run by solar energy and toilets were compost toilets. Okay… Well, we started the training right away and I tried not to think about what would happen in the night. The training went well… or maybe it is just my imagination. Soon it was dark, and the lights were very dim since it had not been a very sunny day. We were told that we would sleep in the dormitories on the campus, but since many people were traveling, we had these large rooms to ourselves. I was petrified wondering what I would do if I needed to trek to the outhouse with a little torch in the middle of the night. How does one talk about this with a man one has just met that morning? Well, dire circumstances need dire solutions. I gave up all semblance of politesse and extracted a promise from Shailendra that he would accompany me if nature called in the middle of the night! These could be memories of a brain that was oxygen deprived, but one of the things that I will never forget is my first glimpse of the stunning Indus River, standing in a cold desert at 15,000 feet, training the SECMOL master trainers. I called Madhav and kept saying “OMG! OMG! It is so beautiful” and he kept saying “What, what…what are you talking about?” It took some time to explain that I was talking about the Indus River!
As I write this, it seems like all this happened yesterday. It is hard to believe that 10 years have passed….