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AT THE START OF A NEW YEAR, commentators often put forward their priorities for accelerated national development. Mine are centred on two sectors of the economy which have been foolishly neglected for the past 66 years since independence.
I believe the golden keys not just of India’s development, but for the development of all countries, are health and primary education. While writing a book on population for the United Nations (Family Planning Success Stories, 1994) I found that population growth had been stabilised only by those developing countries which had attained progress in these two vital sectors. India has not exhibited adequate progress in primary education and health and is saddled with unsustainable population growth which has severely hampered its national development effort.
The main criterion for measuring national health is longevity, or average life span of its people. At the time of independence, the average Indian could expect to live until her mid-30s. Today, thanks largely to the virtual eradication of mass killer diseases such as malaria, cholera, polio and tuberculosis, and drop in infant and maternal mortality, the average Indian can expect to live to her mid-60s. However, many other developing countries whose public healthcare systems were worse than ours seven decades ago, enjoy longer average life spans. An average Chinese, South Korean, Indonesian, Malay, even a Sri Lankan, lives 10-15 years longer, thanks mainly to better public sanitation and healthcare.
In the education sector as well, successive governments at the Centre and in the states have sadly neglected vitally important primary education. According to the latest (January 2014) ninth Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), a survey of primary education in 562 districts of rural India, 96.7 percent of children in the age group 6-14 are enrolled in primary school. That seems like good news. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Despite levying a special cess to fund education and enacting a law to ensure access to elementary education for all children, the Central government has not succeeded in improving learning outcomes in India’s rural schools, says Pratham, the highly respected NGO which conducts this annual survey.
“Proportion of all children in class V who can read a class II text remains at 47 percent. Among class V children enrolled in government schools, the percentage able to read class II level text decreased from 50.3 percent (2009) to 43.8 percent (2011) to 41.1 percent (2013),” comment the authors of ASER 2013. “The same holds true for students’ ability to handle basic math problems,” they add.
ASER 2013 confirms that while there’s been a decline in learning standards in rural government schools, learning outcomes in rural private primaries have improved, resulting in private school enrollment rising from 18.7 percent in 2006 to 29 percent in 2013. In other words, almost one-third of Indian children are now in private schools.
Although declining, an alarming number of children — over 40 percent — are dropping out of the dysfunctional government school system before completing primary education. With 120 million children in government primaries covered by mid-day meal schemes, how does one explain this? The answer is poor infrastructure and teacher absenteeism. Too many primary schools lack basic facilities such as separate toilets for boys and girls, safe drinking water, electricity, even proper buildings (42,000 government schools across the country function without buildings). Then there’s the pervasive venality surrounding education, with large proportions of money allocated to schools being siphoned away by corrupt principals and officials. System-wide, a quarter of the teachers simply don’t turn up to work at government schools every day.
Clearly, a systemic change in primary education is urgently required, particularly in government schools. That less than 5 percent of government primaries are equipped with facilities stipulated by the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, speaks for itself. If entrepreneurs like Shiv Nadar and Azim Premji have realised the importance of promoting primary education by setting up foundations for that purpose, why is the government so short-sighted? Private schools are filling some of the vacuum created by public schooling but for the foreseeable future, the Central and state governments – particularly the latter – will have to remain the main providers of primary education.
Let me end with a paen to a great champion of education, Malala Yousafzai, the courageous Pakistani teenager who was shot in the head by the Taliban for promoting education for girls, but miraculously survived. In an impassioned address to the United Nations, she called for a global struggle against illiteracy, poverty and terrorism. “Let us pick up our books and our pens. They are our most powerful weapons,” she said. “One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution. Education first.”
Those words should be written in letters of gold in the halls of Parliament and state legislative assemblies.
(Rahul Singh is a former editor of Reader’s Digest and Indian Express and consultant to the United Nations)