BAGHPAT, India // On any given day in a state primary school in India, up to one in four teachers is missing. The cost for a country that sees its young population as its ticket to superpower status is huge.
In the poor and agricultural district of Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh, a state that is home to nearly 200 million people, or one in six Indians, absences afflict pupils and fellow teachers alike.
One frustrated headmistress showed the register for her staff: two out of seven full-time teachers are routinely away. One has been seen only a handful of times in 2012 due to back-to-back medical and childcare leave.
"There are so many teachers who don't want to work," she complained in her simple and dimly lit office, asking not to be named because of the sensitive nature of the information she was sharing.
"The government provides books, uniforms and midday meals to all students for free. They are spending so much, but if teachers are not dedicated then all the money is just being wasted."
In other schools dotted around the area, about a two-hour drive from New Delhi, teacher shortages due to absences or under-recruitment mean class sizes are often double the recommended level of 30.
A recent scandal in the area saw 77 teachers sacked after an investigation by a local training college revealed they had forged their own school certificates.
Today's dysfunctional education system is storing up problems for the future, say experts.
"We have this very young population and it has so much potential," Rukmini Banerji from leading Indian education and research group Pratham said.
"If you want children 10 years from now to have 21st-century basic skills, you've got to begin now in grades one and two. If we don't do this, we are going to lose a unique opportunity."
In general, state primary schools in India are "abysmal," says Karthik Muralidharan, a professor at the University of California and long-time researcher on the Indian system.
His studies on teacher absenteeism, done in conjunction with other academics and the World Bank, provide authoritative figures for the problem because they rely on unannounced visits to schools across the country.
In 2003 a survey found an average of 25 per cent of state primary school teachers were absent at any one time. A rerun in 2010 found the figure had improved slightly to 23.7 per cent. In Uttar Pradesh, the rate was still more than 30 per cent.
Some of the absences are legitimate - sickness, maternity or childcare leave, for example, but an estimated 60 per cent are for questionable reasons.
In the worst cases, politically connected teachers take other jobs and pay off school inspectors and continue to collect their salaries.
The overall cost of absent teachers to the government could be as much as 85 billion rupees (Dh5.6bn) a year, Mr Karthik estimates in new research which is yet to be published.
The government has ploughed billions into education as a pillar of its "inclusive growth" agenda aimed at ensuring the benefits of economic development reach the poor, who rely most heavily on state education.
The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, listed the achievements during his Independence Day speech last month.
A total of 51,000 new schools had been opened and about 700,000 teachers hired in the past two years, Singh said. For the first time, a Right to Education Act guarantees state schooling for children from six to 14.
"Our children are the biggest strength of our country," he declared.
The problem is that genuine improvements in infrastructure and enrolment levels have not yet translated into better skills.
Pratham conducts an annual survey of rural state primary schools, which finds that after five years of school more than half of children are still unable to read a basic text in their own language.
And disturbingly for the government and its spending splurge, the national results show an "alarming" fall in standards year-on-year in 2011 with India already "very poor on an international absolute scale."
The consequence is a surge in private education. More than 50 per cent of primary school pupils in cities are enrolled in fee-charging institutions and 25 per cent in rural areas, according to different studies, placing a huge burden on poorer families.
But most continue to attend state schools such as the ones in Baghpat, where the children of agricultural workers and labourers sit on the floor in dimly lit classrooms, learning from a text book that leaves many of them baffled.
