A Throw of DISE? The Hit and Miss of India’s Education Information Management System

• In Event: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Accountability and Datafication in Education: Global Perspectives

Proposal

With improving education outcomes now a global matter of shared concern, there is a world-wide push, led by UNESCO and the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS), to establish comprehensive education management information systems (EMISs) in all 193 member nations to improve educational outcomes. Governments are developing open source data portals to place data in the hands of teachers, headmasters, parents, researcher and citizens at large, who are expected to use these data variously – to ensure accountability, improve teaching and learning, deploy resources thoughtfully and monitor their own progress. A great deal of hope is pinned on the effects EMISs will have on education systems and practices.
India’s District Information System for Education (DISE) is one such ‘hopeful object’ which seeks to improve India’s sprawling education system. Although India has achieved nearly universal enrolment in primary school, it has a high dropout rate and poor learning outcomes. Teacher absenteeism, lack of infrastructure and corruption have historically hampered India’s efforts to improve student outcomes. DISE, which was initially started in 1994 in 43 districts, has now been extended to generate data to track each of India’s 259,468,000 students in its 1,516,865 schools.
DISE aims to provide accurate, verified, reliable information that is annually updated. Keeping a range of users in mind, it anticipates their needs and aims to be helpful. As per the vision of the government, it provides for various types of analyses and presentations at different levels. Knowing the limitations of teachers and headmasters with regard to computer skills, it tries to reduce the scope for errors. As a demonstration of the transparency of the government, it makes itself available to researchers, journalists and other concerned citizens.
However, as Latour (1987) has observed, the fate of an object is in the hands of its users. As different groups encounter and engage with DISE, multiple DISE-user assemblages emerge (de Laet & Mol, 2000; Mol, 2002). In this paper, we report on our empirical explorations of the hit and miss nature of DISE in its bid to engage different users. We take a material-semiotic approach (Law, 2008) and regard DISE as a multiply performed socio-technical object. Based on the analyses of government and policy documents and interviews with a range of actors, including the designers of DISE and various users, we describe the different performances of DISE in different situations and locations.
At a time when ‘data’ have become both worshipped by some as the main, if not the only, path to improvement, and distrusted and dismissed by others as being reductionist, soulless and detrimental, our paper offers a productive form of socio-technical analysis that explores how numeric practices work and what work they do.

Authors

• Radhika Gorur, Deakin University

• Joyeeta Dey, Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters in global education policy and international development