Letter from the Editor
Now that a new caring government has been sworn into office in New Delhi and has promptly crafted the Union budget 2004-05 with the objective of righting the most inequitous wrongs of the lost decades, i.e its failure to deliver quality elementary education and prosperity to rural India (see editorial p.6), the big question is how to ensure the translation of its compassionate intent into implementable programmes on ground zero. Though delivering economic prosperity to rural India which despite the great industrialisation drive of five decades past still supports 670 million people requires a package of initiatives including the construction of a durable marketing infrastructure and development of a downstream agri-business sector, a template for the delivery of quality secondary education to young citizens in rural India already exists.
Almost 20 years ago to the day, the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi (and his then Union HRD minister P. V. Narasimha Rao) initiated a radical proposal to promote public school model boarding schools in every rural district in the country to dispense high quality secondary education to the best and brightest rural children. Two decades later the number of the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas or new age schools has grown to 506, hosting an aggregate population of 140,792 students who are provided completely free residential school education according to the rigorous and respected syllabus prescribed by the Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).
Since then the fortunate few rural children admitted into the JNVs have fully vindicated the late and much lamented prime minister’s faith in them. Pass percentages of JNV students in the tough pan-India CBSE school-leaving board exams are way above the national average and exceed those of Kendriya Vidyalayas and the majority of private sector schools. And though a study to measure the contribution of JNV students to the growth and development of rural India is yet to be undertaken, it can be safely assumed that it is way out of proportion to their number.
And there’s the rub. Although the goal of setting up a JNV offering all the features and facilities of mid-scale private sector, non-government schools has been substantially achieved — and this is perhaps Rajiv Gandhi’s most valuable legacy to the nation — the fact is that there are all too few of them. This is a tried, tested and successful model and the number of JNVs needs to be quickly multiplied so that they can educate several million children rather than a mere 140,792. A first ever audit of the JNV phenomenon conducted by our persevering Delhi-based assistant editor Neeta Lal is the subject matter of our cover feature this month.
The nation’s prized JNVs are boarding schools. Meanwhile there are straws in the wind which indicate that upscale non-government boarding schools are losing their sheen. In our special report feature we beam the spotlight on this issue.
There’s a lot else, particularly numerous informed columns written by experts in their fields, in this monsoon issue of EducationWorld. Check them out and get back to us. Readers views are highly valued because they energise the tepid national debate on vital education issues.
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