Effectiveness of Children Language Improvement Programme (CLIP)

Early childhood education in India is subject to two extreme but contrary deficiencies. On the one hand, millions of young children in lower income groups, especially rural and girl children, comprising nearly 40% of first grade entrants never complete primary school. The outline of the Children’s Language Improvement Programme, 2005-06, was developed by Government of India through several deliberations at different stages.Program was meant to be an ambitious and accelerated learning program, confined not just to language,also promoting number skills.The CLIP was undertaken as a focused program, in a campaign mode, for a specific period of time. How sustainable the breakthroughs in the areas of teacher attendance, attention to weak children, the use of monitoring tools for academic purposes, community school relationships,are has to be seen. Dept of school education has monitored the performance of the program in different phases. To have an independent assessment of the program, the present study was attempted and the results of the study are reported in this paper. The findings indicate similar observations as those found in the survey conducted by the dept of school education.