Right to Education and the Privilege to Ignore!

After dwelling briefly on the achievements of institutes of higher education in India, especially the IITs and the IIMs, Amartya Sen had this to say in his essay, "The Indian Identity":

Yet the underdevelopment of Indian school systems, especially in socially backward regions of the country and particularly among disadvantaged groups, has been equally extraordinary. This is both deeply inefficient and amazingly unjust. The smart boy or clever girl who is deprived of the opportunity of schooling, or who goes to a school with dismal facilities (not to mention the high incidence of absentee teachers), not only loses the opportunities he or she could have had, but also adds to the massive waste of talent that is a characteristic of the life of our country. If we have not yet been able to seize the economic opportunities for the manufacture of simple products in a way that has happened in Japan, Korea, China and other countries in east Asia, not to mention the West, India's remarkable neglect of basic education has a decisive role in this handicap. (emphases added, excerpt from The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, New Delhi, Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005, p. 344.)

About ten days back, I was part of a group that came together to discuss the Right to Education Act that came into force on 1 April 2010. It was an initiative of a friend who is a strong believer in the transformative potential of this new fundamental right. There were some hopefuls and some cynics in the group. In any case, there were some interesting things to be learnt. The right not just seeks to empower the children in the age group of 6 to 14 but also gives a tool in the hands of the parents themselves to ensure that their children get free, compulsory and quality education. That tool is participation in the SMCs or school management committees. The government schools are now supposed to have an SMC, in which the proportion of parents will be 75% and 50% of members should be women. The medium of instruction will be the mother tongue. Teachers will not be burdened with non-academic work, except election duties (in best case scenario, once or twice in five years) and during instances of natural calamities. There are other liberating features: No child can be declined admission in case he or she cannot produce a birth certificate. For those who want to learn more, the "right" can be downloaded from here.

While there were some who pointed that there are flaws in this law, my believer friend was quick to point out that RTI and NREGA are also two such tools that are fraught with problems but they have also delivered. Even if limited, their gains are huge. Same can happen with this act! I think so. By the way, my concern is that we must have motivated young men and women, not just motivate but idealistic in that old-fashioned way, who are ready to dedicate themselves to teaching in such schools. Do we have that breed anymore? Or am I being a being a dreamer in a foolish way? Can't say.

We certainly need more awareness and discussion on this. This is quite a revolutionary act, but strangely no consistent follow-up is being done. There are no front-page stories. Nothing by way of urgent-sounding op-eds either. Since India's leap into big league of global economic powerhouses is dependent on the springboard of quality education, it is surprising to see that corporate India is not talking about it. Or have I missed something? Meanwhile, here's one article that discusses some core issues.

(Photo: http://advocacynet.org/wordpress-mu/tmathys/blog/tag/nizamuddin/)

Nothing sentimental about college education

I just came across an interview Tarun Tejpal gave to a career magazine. The interview had a rather catchy title "India's rich fund temples, not educational institutions", but what was of interest to me was his recounting of his college days. I felt a bit lofty that he did his BA from my city, though not from my college. DAV College in Sector 10 would too be proud of its alumnus. There is only one problem—Tejpal admits that he did not attend a single class in those entire three years! That obviously means that his "education" happened outside the institute and his college was merely a document-provider, giving him an official-looking piece of paper, a testimonial that he is a graduate. And barring some elite institutions, which mostly teach sciences, colleges in India are perfect breeding grounds for autodidacts. Two of my classmates immediately come to my mind, one has ended up being a bureaucrat while I saw the other selling vegetables in a mandi, sitting alongside men, most of whom, I am pretty sure, never had the chance to see how a degree college looks like from inside. College education was incidental to life pursuits of these two classmates of mine. I am increasingly of the opinion that for most of us Indians, it is not the education system that decides what we will end up doing in life but other things such as our family background and the web of social relationships we are part of. In this sense, perhaps, Indian education system is still a bit medieval if not ancient, where things like caste and class limit one's vocation in life. This, of course, is not to generalize, individual freedom does exist and perhaps in many other cases children find it easy to slip into the role their parents once performed (talking about roles, Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan are examples of individual freedom and family legacy respectively), but there have been umpteen number of cases where undeserving candidates get selected at the cost of people really cut out for a particular position. We do meet such professionals who are there because of a plug and not because of merit alone.

Dirty education!

A little distance from the new house we have recently shifted to is a slum. Our house is in Mohali and the slum technically belongs to the union territory of Chandigarh, the quintessential modern city that was supposed to be "unfettered by past" especially the filth that that past has accumulated over centuries. While I drove with my wife this morning past that slum, euphemistically called a "village", we wondered what happened to the residents in the monsoons, for some houses were actually built over the sewers while a channel of dirty water flowed below them. And as we were trying to clear the scenes of that obscenity from our minds, I caught sight of two little girl students of a local school relieving themselves in the open. They were in their uniform so they couldn't have been two urchins who were never taught the rules of propriety and the need of hygiene. Their classmates played close by and some of them would have taken a "bathroom break" sooner or later. Yes, it was a school.

A naïve question. Is one allowed to run a school without a bathroom? Schools are being run without libraries. Schools are being run without classrooms, furniture, blackboards. Schools are being run without teachers. Who gives a damn about bathrooms when schools are being run without conscience? The conscience of a nation is dead when two little school-going girls have no option but to sit on a garbage heap close to their playground to pee. The conscience of a nation is dead when the poor are deceived with empty rhetoric of Right to Education. The conscience of a nation is surely dead when, quite literally, the filthy rich businessmen begin running the education show, and that too with only one aim—to find ways to fish for another rich man's fortune through the fishing rod of his child with a bait of "world-class" education.

This is not a one-off incident. Today itself I found two reports in the city edition of The Tribune about abysmal conditions in our schools. One is about a school in another "village" around the city of Chandigarh, where 200 students share one toilet and about four are locked for the use of teachers. Another one is a story about a school in Fatehgarh Sahib where fire-fighting equipments are thought to be as useless as bathrooms in our neighbouring "village".

(Pictures: From the two news reports)