As education is on the concurrent list of the constitution, it is partially a state subject.
As a result, there are some differences in school structure and in definitions of
progression across states. We will not concern ourselves with these here as we are
interested in applying a uniform scale across all states, with a view to assessing the
likelihood of India as a whole attaining the MDG for education.
In this paper, we look at two indicators, primary school attendance and the primary
school completion rate. For each of these, the analysis is conducted first for all
children and then for boys and girls separately. Primary school age is defined as 6-11
years. This corresponds to grades 1-5, and is sometimes referred to as lower-primary.2
The primary school attendance or enrolment rate is the ratio of the number of children
aged 6-11 attending school to the total number of children aged 6-11. We are further
interested in the completion rate since, in many developing countries, including India,
it is common that children enrol in school but then fail to progress, or dropout. This
may reflect the quality of schools but it may alternatively reflect the volatility of