Access Without Parity in Achievement? Gender Gaps in School Participation and Learning Outcomes in Jharkhand

Le résumé fourni par la source

This paper examines the gender-based structure of school education in Jharkhand by integrating the National Achievement Survey (NAS) for 2017 and 2021, which measures competency-based learning of students in Classes 3, 5, 8 and 10, and the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) administrative census from 2021–22 through 2024–25. The study provides a gender-disaggregated panel of achievement scores, Gross Enrolment Ratios (GER), the Gender Parity Index (GPI), transition rates and dropout rates. The empirical evidence uncovers a structural paradox: while targeted state interventions have effectively eliminated gender gaps in physical school access driving the GPI to or above unity across primary and upper-primary levels a persistent and widening gap emerges in quantitative learning. In mathematics, an initial gender parity at the foundational stage systematically gives way to a male advantage that peaks by Class 10, where the national female mean of 216 trails the male mean of 219 on a 500-point scale. The analysis situates these findings within Jharkhand’s socioeconomic landscape; a 26.2 percent Scheduled Tribe population, a 55.4 percent female literacy rate, seasonal labour migration and a fragile secondary-school network and develops a humancapital production framework to interpret them. The analysis identifies secondary-school retention and the in-classroom mathematics gap as the binding constraints on girls’ educational attainment. The paper concludes with policy reorientations aligned with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 targets for 2030, synthesising recent macro-fiscal data indicating that statelevel structural constraints, rather than household apathy, act as the primary impediment to bridging the quantitative skills deficit.

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