For the past 11 years Lok Mitra, a Rae Bareilly-based NGO promoted in 1997 by the husband- wife team of Rajesh Kumar and Priya, graduates of the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (Gujarat) and Patna University respectively, has been working to upgrade primary schools in Uttar Pradesh (literacy: 57.3 percent), and make them more accountable to parents and students. The duo has been pushing for greater parental interaction with district levels of government and administration, so that primary education and health services can be effectively delivered to women, children and weaker sections of society.
According to Priya, excessive control and centralisation by state governments is ruining pre-school and primary education. “Take something as fundamental as the design of school buildings. The slant in classroom roofs is such that during the rains, water falls at the class entrance, wetting children. But because it is mandated by government bureaucrats in Lucknow, that’s how it has to be designed. Similarly while formerly Rs.500 was given as an incentive to a teacher to develop locally-relevant teaching-learning material, there’s a uniformity imposed, killing whatever little innovation the earlier system encouraged,” she says.
Lok Mitra is working to change all this by setting up parent forums — committees of parents at the school level which federate into bigger entities at the cluster, block and district levels providing platforms for parents to speak up. “While the provisions of the Panchayati Raj Act, 1992 provide for parent representatives to be included in Village Education Committees charged with supervising government schools, the committees are usually staffed by uninterested members who convene meetings as formalities. This has to change,” says Rajesh.
Besides parent forums, Lok Mitra has also successfully initiated teacher forums in which hands-on training is imparted to teachers to encourage them to innovate and localise learning systems. To this it has recently added training for pre-primary caretakers in government run day centres under the Integrated Child Development Services programme, to better prepare first generation learners to integrate into primary schools.
The results have begun to show in 200 primary schools of the three blocks with which Lok Mitra is directly involved, and in the 50 other schools where the NGO is working with other non-governmental organisations. Uttar Pradesh’s notorious teacher absenteeism is addressed by the parents’ community identifying volunteers and paying them until regular teachers are appointed.
Moreover Lok Mitra has launched a monthly newsletter titled Guhar (‘desperate appeal’), designed specifically to inform UP’s 403 MLAs of education problems at the grassroots level. It also runs 20 education centres that serve to mainstream adolescent girl drop-outs.
“We have set ourselves an ambitious target to decentralise primary education. By 2013 we intend to establish parent forums in at least one block of each of the state’s 70 districts, to support education reforms. Education is an issue that every parent needs to be involved with,” says Rajesh Kumar, whose efforts provide a lifeline in a state where poverty and illiteracy are rampant.
Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)