Gender, Education, and Fieldwork: Women's Engagement in Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation in Rajasthan, India

• In Event: Educating the Whole Person: Identity, Belonging, and Social–Emotional Development Across Cultures

Proposal

For 20 years, India’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has been a massive participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) effort aimed at producing vital data on rural children’s foundational learning and school participation. Mobilizing thousands of volunteers and paid staff to do arduous fieldwork, ASER collects information on school enrollment, affluence, parental education and other contextual information in children’s households. Conducted in over 500 districts nationwide, ASER includes surveys of rural government primary schools and simple standardized tests in literacy and numeracy administered to children in their village homes. This vast, rapid data collection is a quest to situate children’s basic learning skills and enrollment in context of their local village, government school, and household data. In doing so, ASER has filled a major data gap—collecting data on roughly 600,000 children in each cycle—an enormous undertaking for an NGO (Pratham, 2025). For government entities, civil society organizations, academics, and the Indian public, ASER has been a consistent source of independent, unmanipulated data on rural children’s learning, their school participation, and government schools’ compliance with India’s Right to Education Act of 2009 and National Education Policy of 2000 (Pratham, 2015, 2025). While ASER has significantly influenced education policymaking in India and internationally, far less attention has been paid to its decentralized implementation process and the lived experiences of those who carry it out. This presentation examines the fieldwork experiences and interpretations of three young women who participated in ASER 2014 in Rajasthan.

Among Indian states, Rajasthan has some of the starkest gender disparities in education and public life (e.g., Kelly et al., 2016; Kumari & Shekhar, 2023). In 2014, 31% of 15-and 16-year-old girls and 12.1% of 11- to 14-year-old girls were out of school –figures that are significantly out of step with national averages for out-of-school girls (17.3% and 5.7%) and for Rajasthani boys (18.4% and 5%) (Pratham, 2015). The data underscore compounding gender and regional factors in girls’ disadvantaged educational access. Adolescent girls in northern India often bear disproportionate responsibility for household duties, sibling childcare, and absorbing family’s resource limitations, leading to persistent barriers and inequity in their schooling access, experiences, and outcomes (e.g., De et al., 2011). Additionally, the threat of gender-based violence shapes many Rajasthani girls’ participation in education and their ability to travel safely to schools and universities from their homes, and traditional marriage practices for females that are prevalent in Rajasthan (e.g., child marriages and dowries) dissuade some families from educating older adolescent girls (Kumari & Shekar, 2023).

Intersectionality presents a complex framework for analyzing gender’s nuanced relationship to injustice in India. It prompts researchers to look beyond a single axis of identity (e.g., gender) and perceive multiple axes as not merely additive forms of oppression but cooperating to form “qualitatively different” experiences (John, 2019, p. 190). In India, gendered practices and their associated inequities typically depend upon other factors, including class or affluence; region, rurality, and remoteness; ethnicity; caste and religion; parent education; sibling number, order, and gender; and local and national politics (Kelly et al., 2016). Despite other factors’ significance, gender accounts for many commonalities in girls’ and women’s experiences in Rajasthan. Their lives are shaped by common societal ideas regarding their gender and travel, personal security, and position within their home and community. In context of these principles of normalcy, ASER fieldwork can appear impractical, risky, or preposterous.

Drawing on interviews, fieldnotes, and documents, the study explores how gender, class, and institutional dynamics shape who engages in ASER, under what conditions, and with what consequences. The study’s data were collected through multistate ethnographic research in India that observed the key phases of ASER 2014. This article analyzes ethnographic data from Rajasthan, specifically interviews with three participants who were the few women fieldworkers collecting ASER data. We address two questions: 1. How do the women describe their fieldwork experiences? 2. What meaning has ASER had in the women’s lives? We employed an abductive approach to our data analysis (Tracy, 2019) to emphasize an emic interpretation while incorporating insights from established theory on intersectionality.

The women’s narratives reveal that ASER fieldwork is a site for expanding consciousness and personal agency. Their fieldwork reflections illustrate their thriving "power within" (Kabeer, 1999) —their growing self-awareness of their capacity to act, to endure, and to imagine alternate futures. As Puja shares, “That's why we joined this [ASER]. We will learn and we will experience . . . . Some people think girls can't do fieldwork, so we were thinking, we will try.” At the same time, social position creates an uneven terrain for people’s transformation via fieldwork. The women’s accounts depict that ASER’s impact is not uniform nor universally emancipatory. Rather, fieldwork’s impact is shaped by intersecting factors including gender, class, institutional role, and geographic location. The same fieldwork opportunity may serve as a confidence-building exercise, a confrontation with structural inequality, or a space of exhaustion and constraints. Behind ASER’s massive civic action, these women’s stories elucidate their distinct processes of decision-making, emphasizing the need to refute instrumental accounts of empowerment (Kabir, 1999) by examining the intersectional positionalities that influence women’s engagement in educational PM&E and activism.

De, A., Khera, R., Samson, M., & Kumar, A. (2011). PROBE revisited: A Report on elementary education in India.
John, M. (2019). Responses to Indian Feminists’ Objections. In Arya & Rathore (eds)., Dalit Feminist Theory. Routledge.
Kabeer, N. (1999). Resources, agency, achievements: Reflections on the measurement of women's empowerment. Development and Change, 30(3), 435–464.
Kelly, O., Krishna, A., & Bhabha, J. (2016). Private schooling and gender justice: An empirical snapshot from Rajasthan, India’s largest state. International Journal of Educational Development, 46, 175–187.
Kumari, N., & Shekhar, C. (2023). Trend and determinants of early marriage in Rajasthan: Evidence from the national family health survey. Children and Youth Services Review, 145, 106746.
Pratham. (2025). Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2024.
Pratham. (2015). Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2014.
Tracy, S. J. (2019). Qualitative research methods: Collecting evidence, crafting analysis, communicating impact. John Wiley & Sons.

Authors

• Melissa Goodnight, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Ananya Tiwari, Texas A&M University