Empowering Villages: Local Committees and Education Management

When we talk about improving school education in rural India, the conversation almost always leads back to one fundamental question: who is actually in charge at the village level? For decades, educational governance in India was a top-down affair – policies made in state capitals and national ministries that often had little connection to the realities of a school in a remote village. The push to change that began in earnest with a series of national policy decisions and community-led experiments that placed local people at the centre of school management. Understanding how those structures work – and where they still fall short – is key to understanding why millions of children in rural India are now in school, and why millions more still aren’t.

The three pillars of village-level education governance
Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs)
Village Education Committees (VECs)
School Management Committees (SMCs)
The policy foundation: NPE 1986 and the Programme of Action 1992
Community-led education in action: Lok Jumbish and the Shiksha Karmi Project
The Shiksha Karmi Project (1987)
The Lok Jumbish Project (1992)
Challenges in implementation: the limits of VECs

The three pillars of village-level education governance

At the village level, three types of bodies share responsibility for managing and overseeing elementary education: Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs), Village Education Committees (VECs), and School Management Committees (SMCs). While they all aim at community participation, they are distinct in structure, legal basis, and scope of authority.

Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs)

PTAs are the most informal of the three. They bring together parents and teachers of a specific school to discuss the school’s day-to-day functioning, address grievances, and create a communication channel between the home and the classroom. PTAs tend to be advisory in nature – they can raise concerns and suggest improvements, but they typically lack the formal authority to direct how funds are spent or how policies are implemented. Their strength lies in creating a regular dialogue between the school and the families it serves.

Village Education Committees (VECs)

VECs are village-level regulatory bodies formed to ensure community participation in the smooth functioning of schools across an entire village – not just a single school. The head of a VEC is typically the Gram Pradhan (village head), and the committee consists of six to fourteen members elected by the Gram Sabha. This gives VECs a degree of democratic legitimacy rooted in local governance. VECs were first established under the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) and later institutionalised through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), with the goal of anchoring educational decisions within local communities. Their mandate includes micro-planning, boosting enrolment and retention, promoting girls’ education, and facilitating school-level monitoring and resource management.

The institutional framework of VECs also mandates inclusive representation – at least 50% of VEC members must be women, with mandatory inclusion of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and other marginalised communities. This structural requirement reflects the understanding that educational decisions in villages cannot be left to a narrow elite.

School Management Committees (SMCs)

SMCs operate at the individual school level and carry formal legal authority under the Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009. Unlike PTAs or VECs, SMCs are constituted under a specific law that defines their composition, powers, and responsibilities. The head of an SMC is a parent or guardian of a student in that school – a deliberate choice to ensure that those most directly affected by school quality have a voice in governance. SMCs are mandated to prepare School Development Plans (SDPs), oversee the use of government grants, monitor teacher and student attendance, manage the mid-day meal programme, and ensure that the school complies with RTE norms. The SMC must meet at least once a month, and the minutes and decisions of these meetings must be recorded and made available to the public.

Together, PTAs, VECs, and SMCs form a layered system of governance – from informal dialogue at the PTA level to formal statutory oversight through the SMC – that is designed to make schools accountable to the communities they serve.

The policy foundation: NPE 1986 and the Programme of Action 1992

The architecture of village-level education governance did not emerge overnight. Its foundations were laid by two landmark national policy documents: the National Policy on Education (NPE) 1986 and the Programme of Action (PoA) 1992.

The NPE 1986, introduced during the Rajiv Gandhi government, marked a decisive shift in how India thought about schooling. The policy called for special emphasis on the removal of disparities and equalising educational opportunity, particularly for women, Scheduled Tribes, and Scheduled Castes. It introduced the idea of decentralisation as a core management principle – recognising that a school in a remote tribal village had needs and challenges that a bureaucrat in a state capital simply could not anticipate or address. The NPE explicitly called for Village Education Committees as instruments of community oversight and proposed School Management Committees as vehicles for involving parents and community members in school governance.

The PoA 1992 took this further. The 1992 revision emphasised the need for decentralisation and community participation in education, recognising that local communities should have a greater say in educational planning and implementation. It was the operational blueprint that translated the NPE’s vision into concrete timelines, responsible agencies, and monitoring systems. Among its key modifications, the PoA 1992 pushed for at least 50% female teachers in future elementary-level appointments and expanded the scope of community-level planning. The NPE 1986 and the accompanying Programme of Action called for an integrated and decentralised approach to developing school education systems, with a focus on building the capacity of districts in planning and management.

The 73rd Constitutional Amendment of 1992 reinforced this direction by giving constitutional status to Panchayati Raj Institutions, creating a legal foundation for local self-governance – including in education – that VECs and SMCs could be built upon.

Community-led education in action: Lok Jumbish and the Shiksha Karmi Project

Policy documents set the direction, but it is on-the-ground programmes that test whether those ideas actually work. Two projects in Rajasthan – one of India’s most educationally backward states well into the 1990s – offer some of the most instructive examples of village-level education management in practice.

The Shiksha Karmi Project (1987)

The Shiksha Karmi Project (SKP) was launched by the Government of Rajasthan in 1987, with assistance from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), to address the crisis in remote villages where qualified teachers were either absent or unwilling to work. Its solution was both practical and community-rooted: identify local youth – often with just a Class 8 qualification for males and Class 5 for women – train them rigorously, and deploy them as Shiksha Karmis (education workers) in their own villages. The logic was straightforward. A teacher who comes from the community, speaks the same language, and has family ties there is far less likely to be absent.

The Shiksha Karmi Project constituted VECs in 2,000 villages to promote community involvement in primary education and encourage village-level planning. VECs under the project were responsible for mobilising resources for school maintenance, repair, and construction. The programme also ran non-formal learning centres – Prehar Pathshalas (schools at convenient timings) and Angan Pathshalas for girls – to reach children who could not attend regular school hours due to domestic responsibilities. By 1999, the project had established more than 8,000 alternative schools across over 7,000 villages.

The Lok Jumbish Project (1992)

The Lok Jumbish (People’s Movement) programme was a joint initiative of the Government of Rajasthan and local NGOs, launched in 1992, aimed at achieving the universalisation of elementary education through mass mobilisation and community participation, with special emphasis on girls and disadvantaged groups. While the Shiksha Karmi Project focused on fixing teacher absence, Lok Jumbish took a broader approach – it sought to make the entire village take ownership of its school.

The project operated on seven guiding principles: a process rather than product approach, partnerships, decentralised functioning, participatory learning, integration with the mainstream education system, management flexibility, and multiple levels of leadership. Lok Jumbish had a positive effect on the empowerment of locally-elected people, especially female representatives at the village level, who often became active members of Lok Jumbish core teams or women’s groups.

The results were significant. Over the first four years of the project (1992-1996), enrolment rates in Lok Jumbish villages increased by 24 percent. By 1998, the initiative had extended to 75 blocks, covering nearly one-third of rural Rajasthan, reaching a population of approximately 12 million. The project developed its own teacher training modules and introduced a non-formal education programme called Sahaj Shiksha in 1993, which was competency-based and awarded certificates equivalent to the formal system.

Both projects demonstrated the same core truth: mobilising the village community to take responsibility for ensuring quality education for every child is the core strategy of community-based education, and community involvement has been crucial for the success of these projects.

Challenges in implementation: the limits of VECs

The structural logic of VECs and SMCs is sound. But the gap between policy design and ground-level reality has been persistent and, in some areas, wide.

The most fundamental problem is one of authority. VECs were created to empower communities, but in practice, they have often been given responsibility without corresponding power. Studies reveal that in many areas, governance remains centralised, the roles of VEC members are ambiguously defined, and there is limited genuine grassroots engagement in decision-making. A VEC that can flag a problem – such as a broken classroom roof, a missing teacher, or a lack of textbooks – but cannot independently direct funds to fix it is a committee in name only.

Capacity is a related challenge. Committees with members possessing secondary education or higher have demonstrated greater activity and effectiveness, whereas those with predominantly illiterate members have faced challenges in participation and leadership. When the people tasked with overseeing a school cannot themselves read the notices, grants, or policy documents that relate to its functioning, meaningful oversight is difficult to achieve.

Resource constraints compound the problem. Many VECs are expected to monitor infrastructure, enrolment, and teaching quality without having any independent budget of their own. Their ability to act depends entirely on what state governments or programmes like Samagra Shiksha choose to delegate to them – and that delegation has been uneven across states.

The experience of Lok Jumbish is instructive here too. The project suffered a setback when its resource institutions collapsed and state-level governmental institutions could not take up the responsibility of curricular reforms effectively. Political changes also disrupted its functioning, as the project’s autonomy clashed with vested interests at the block and district level. This points to a deeper issue: community governance in education cannot survive without genuine political support and stable institutional backing from the state.

What VECs and SMCs need, in essence, is the same thing communities have always needed to exercise real power: clear authority, adequate resources, genuine capacity-building, and protection from political interference. VEC members remain actively engaged in monitoring teacher attendance, assessing pedagogical methods, and overseeing student learning outcomes – indicating their untapped potential to drive meaningful educational reform, if given the tools to do so.

India’s village-level management structures represent one of the world’s most ambitious experiments in decentralising educational governance. The legal scaffolding – from the NPE 1986 to the RTE Act 2009 – is solid. The on-the-ground evidence from Rajasthan’s community programmes shows that when communities are genuinely empowered, children go to school and stay there. The unfinished task is closing the gap between the committee on paper and the committee with real authority on the ground.

What do you think? If Village Education Committees were given independent budgets and real decision-making authority over teacher deployment in their village, how do you think that would change school outcomes in rural India? And should the eligibility criteria for VEC membership require a minimum level of literacy – or would that effectively exclude the communities most in need of representation?

References

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Table of Contents

The three pillars of village-level education governance 🔗

Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) 🔗

Village Education Committees (VECs) 🔗

School Management Committees (SMCs) 🔗

The policy foundation: NPE 1986 and the Programme of Action 1992 🔗

Community-led education in action: Lok Jumbish and the Shiksha Karmi Project 🔗

The Shiksha Karmi Project (1987) 🔗

The Lok Jumbish Project (1992) 🔗

Challenges in implementation: the limits of VECs 🔗