UK's £400m aid for India schools 'squandered' after education standards FALL

Hundreds of millions of pounds in British aid has been squandered on schools in India where standards have fallen.

Britain has pumped £388million into the Indian education system over the past eight years, and is due to spend another £117million by 2013.

But an investigation has revealed that much of the money has been wasted and that standards of reading, writing and arithmetic have dropped.

The spending has been questioned because standards in many Indian state schools –where old-fashioned and rigorous teaching methods are still employed – are often far higher than in Britain.

But even if the money is designed to improve education in poor, rural areas, it still appears to have failed, according to a study by the Indian government.

Standards in the most impoverished regions have fallen to such an extent that national figures show up to a quarter of primary school teachers are routinely absent, half of ten-year-olds cannot read a sentence and only a third can do a simple sum.