Education News

Pathetic record

The State of the World’s Children Report 2005, a UNICEF document released in various parts of the country earlier this month, paints a grim picture of childhood in India especially in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state (166 million) which hosts one-sixth of the country’s children. According to UNICEF, one billion children worldwide (i.e every second child globally) is living in poverty and deprivation. The major indicators of deprivation which strongly impact children’s lives says the report, are lack of adequate shelter, unsafe drinking water and sanitation, health and food insecurity, and lack of access to a school. Other indicators of deprivation are infant mortality, malnutrition, child labour and child abuse — the result of a variety of economic, social and cultural factors.

India’s pathetic record in upholding child rights attracts stinging — and deserved — criticism. Of every 100 children born in India only 35 births are registered, only 93 will make it to their first birthday, five will die of malnutrition, 42 will remain underweight and only 25 will get through primary school. Girl children suffer more. The sex ratio (between ages 0 and six) has dipped from 927 in 1991 to 916 at present, 43 percent of adolescent girls are anaemic while their annual school drop out rate is an alarming 31 percent.

Barring some states like Chattisgarh, Bihar, Assam and Madhya Pradesh which fare even worse on some indicators, Uttar Pradesh fares badly on every chosen indicator. Thus, while maternal mortality rate in India is 540 per 1000, in UP it is 707. Likewise the infant mortality rate is 83 per 1,000 and under-five mortality 123 as compared to the all India figures of 67 and 96. Shockingly a child dies every 50 seconds in the state and 33 percent of new borns are underweight against the national average of 26 percent. Only six percent of households, (cf. 36 percent nationwide) use iodised salt while only 26 percent of households in India’s largest and most populous state have toilets against a national average of 37 percent. Not surprisingly average life expectancy at birth is 57.2 years against the national average of 61. The only bright spot is the access to improved sources (pipes and hand pumps) of drinking water. While the national average is 83 percent, in Uttar Pradesh 89 percent have access to drinking water. Unsurprisingly the number of children living below the poverty line is 24,196, much higher than in Kerala (1,281), Gujarat (5,269), West Bengal (8,431), Uttaranchal (1,137) and Maharashtra (9,211).

According to State of the World’s Children 2005 the prime cause for the sad condition of UP’s children is that women are short changed. The standards of a primary health centre for every 25,000-30,000 population with 24 hour facilities for delivery and childcare and a hospital per 1.5 lakh population are heavily unmet in a state where 707 women per 1,000 die in child birth every year and only 28.6 percent of child births receive trained assistance.

"One area of immediate concern should be children with HIV/AIDS. The figures are expected to soar in the next two years. We need to draw a comprehensive strategy to tackle this threat as there is no data or study which can help us to assess the severity of the situation," says Ray Torres UNICEF’s director for Uttar Pradesh. Data in the report reveals that only 43 percent of women in India (22 percent in UP) have ever heard of HIV/AIDS.

According to Torres a better deal for UP’s much neglected children requires greater political involvement in their cause. "Local representatives, MLAs and MPs have to generate awareness about this data in their respective legislative and executive bodies. Only constant pressure and monitoring can ensure our children a better deal. If we fail to secure childhood, we will fail in our quest of ensuring human rights and economic development," he warns.

But the most telling warning comes from UNICEF director Carol Bellamy. The director’s message in the preface of the report warns: "As children go, so go nations." It’s a message that needs widespread dissemination.

Puja Rawat (Lucknow)

Left freeze

At a time when the higher education sector in India seems about to be thrown wide open to foreign universities under WTO guidelines, paradoxically two charitable trusts or ‘missions’ which have made widely acknowledged contributions to Indian education are struggling to establish universities. Both these Kolkata based trusts — the highly respected RamaKrishna Mission (RKM) and the equally well known Ramakrishna Vivekananda Mission (RVM) — have been trying for several years to set up self-financed, self-administered universities in Kolkata without success.

According to Swami Atmapriyananda, principal of Belur Vidya Mandir, an RKM high school situated in Belur in suburban Kolkata, the proposed university will be named after Swami Vivekananda. "It will aim at establishing a system of higher education based on the ideals of Swamiji. Initially, the institution will function as an open university. But conventional classroom-based study courses will be introduced later on," he says.

In Kolkata’s academic circles it is hardly a secret that RKM’s proposal to initially function as an open university had to be devised to give some momentum to the proposal stymied by Left politicians and intellectuals in Kolkata and Delhi to whom the idea of self-funded, independently-run institutions of higher learning in West Bengal in which the ruling party would have no say, is anathema. And now that the resurgent Left has a big say in the Union government, its stranglehold over these two applications — after all, education is a concurrent subject — has become tighter. Moreover value-based education of any shade or hue — except gobbledy-gook Marxism — is synony-mous with anti-secularism or worse, hindutva. Hence the stonewall.

Last March RKM’s governing body had requested the CPM-led West Bengal government to forward its proposal to establish an open university to the Central government. A nine-member committee, including West Bengal’s principal secretary of higher education Jawhar Sarkar, was constituted to look into the proposal. A lukewarm report endorsing the application was forwarded to the Union HRD ministry in August for further action.

The union human resource development ministry in turn has constituted another committee to "examine" the mission’s proposal to establish the university. Chaired by H.P. Dikshit, chairman of the Distance Education Council and vice-chancellor of Indira Gandhi Open University, it includes Swami Atmapriyananda (quoted above) as a member. This committee has met three times and there are unconfirmed reports that it will submit its report by March 2005. There is a chance the open university might be okayed, but not a full-fledged university with a campus.

Likewise the proposal of Ramakrishna Vivekananda Mission, Kolkata is also stranded in deep waters. RVM spokesmen emphasise that time is of the essence. "The nation has failed to respond to the message given by educationists like Maharshi Dayananda Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. The education reforms proposed by the Radhakrishnan and Kothari commissions which had pleaded for incorporation of profound value systems incorporating the plurality of India’s religions have not been implemented. Instead, the nation has remained stuck in the Macaulayan model of education. We have demonstrated great timidity by refraining from proposing any radical changes that would have contributed to the shaping of a true national system of education as also to the shaping of young people into courageous nation builders," says RVM general secretary Rev. Swami Nityanandaji Maharaj.

RVM’s credentials are impeccable. It runs 55 schools and colleges with 7,712 students on its rolls and is understandably confident of its ability to run the proposed Vivekananda National University which will provide value-based education as an "instrument for character development".

Assuming that the government would welcome its proposal to establish an idealism-driven secular institution of higher learning, RVM even announced that the Vivekananda National University will be constructed on a ten acre plot in north Kolkata owned by the mission. However, this has not happened. While RKM’s proposal for an open university requires the Centre’s sanction, RVM’s application for a conventional university has been stalled by the state government.

"Swamiji belongs to all of India, but since he lived, worked and died in Bengal we were keen to have the university here. But for some reason or other, our application to the state government has not been considered sympathetically and we have been compelled to go to other states," says Swami Nityanandaji. Therefore it’s possible that the proposed Vivekananda National University may spring up in Jharkhand or in Chattisgarh where the red carpets have been rolled out for the project.

Be that as it may, RKM and RVM’s idealistic initiatives driven by noble intentions, have been stalled. Quite obviously the comrades of the politbureau believe that petty men can freeze great ideas to death.

Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)

Intensifying autonomy discourse

Collegiate autonomy, an exhaustively debated issue of the past few decades, is back on the priority list of the Union government, championed by the Union human resource development minister Arjun Singh and backed by the University Grants Commission. A two-day workshop convened on November 30 by the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), the highest advisory body on education to the Central and state governments, at Madras University, attracted a massive 117 participants.

The stellar list of delegates included Ved Prakash, secretary, UGC; Kanti Biswas, West Bengal’s minister for education and chairman of the CABE committee on autonomy; D. Manjunath, Karnataka’s education minister and member of CABE; P.V. Indiresan, former director of IIT Madras; M. Anandakrishnan, chairman, Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS); A. Gnanam and S.P Thyagarajan, former and incumbent vice-chancellors of Madras University as well as Meenakshi Rajagopal, special secretary of higher education, Tamil Nadu. Also present were 16 university vice-chancellors, directors of higher education, heads of autonomous colleges and teachers.

"At the end of the two-day workshop, the consensus which emerged was that there is a good case for complete academic, financial and administrative autonomy — with accountability — and institutions of higher education should be allowed to determine their study programmes, teaching methodologies and assessment methods. With globalisation, technology changes and entry of foreign universities, autonomy has acquired a new meaning though it also requires accountability. The workshop deliberated on how to make autonomy with built-in accountability acceptable in colleges across the country. The recommendations of the workshop will help the CABE committee to weigh the issues regarding collegiate autonomy and recommend a balanced course of action," says S.P. Thyagarajan, vice-chancellor, University of Madras.

Of the four workshops scheduled by CABE, Chennai was the second following the first at Pune on November 8-9. Two more are scheduled in Guwahati and Chandigarh, after which reports and suggestions will be submitted to the autonomy committee in March 2005. Apart from staging these high-level seminars the CABE committee has also drawn up a questionnaire to be distributed to a larger cross-section of stakeholders in education.

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The revival of CABE and the renewed importance given to it has been widely welcomed in Indian academia. In particular its search for a consensus on collegiate autonomy, has widely been welcomed. As has been often reported in features and news reports of EducationWorld, the managements of front-rank and highly rated colleges have long been demanding autonomy with the freedom to design their own curriculums, conduct exams and even award their own degrees. Though the UGC has already begun to confer autonomy on colleges rated highly by its subsidiary NAAC (National Accreditation and Assessment Council), grant of autonomy requires clearance by the affiliating university and state government which is not always forthcoming. Moreover even autonomous colleges have to obtain the approval of the parent university for introducing new study programmes.

The intensifying debate on collegiate autonomy has also prompted a re-look at the definition of autonomy. "One big change in the higher education scenario is the emergence of a large number of private deemed universities which have very little accountability. The consensus at the workshop was that autonomy is desirable but so is accountability. Regulatory authori-ties are willing to grant autonomous status to institutions with proven track records provided they are open to regular inspection and monitoring. The credibility of Indian higher education abroad depends upon quick liberalisation and deregulation without dilution of standards," says M. Anandakrishnan, chairman, MIDS.

As evidenced at the Chennai workshop, the movement for collegiate autonomy seems to be gaining momentum. UGC is strongly backing it, having set itself the target of granting autonomous status to 500 colleges in the country during the Tenth Plan. But first the under-debated subject of financial autonomy needs to be honestly addressed.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)

Pratham partnership initiative

A recently concluded, first-of-its-kind national survey, conducted by the Union ministry of human resource development (HRD), among 80 schools in the country’s four metros, (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata), reveals that private schools are spending a minuscule Rs.1.50 per month per student on community service programmes, care for the disabled and other socially useful productive work, leading to education which is painfully low in inculcating social commitment within students. Perhaps less noticeable was another conclusion of the same survey: of the approximately 130 million children in government schools today, barely half can read and write their names even after three years of schooling.

Though it required a major survey to make the Union government aware of this well known reality, a non-government organisation Pratham has been involved since 1994 in a tripartite partnership between communities, governments and the corporate sector to ensure that ritual education is replaced by real learning in the nation’s primary school class-rooms.The Mumbai-based Pratham’s latest initiative is a partnership with the midscale and highly respected Villa Theresa convent school in south Mumbai, (Villa Theresa was recently adjudged one of the top ten philanthrophic schools in the country in a list drawn up by the Union HRD ministry in the national survey mentioned above), to partner with it in its Read India project — a rapid, large scale, replicable ‘learning to read’ programme, based on a low-cost technique developed by Pratham.

Currently being used in 12 states in five different languages, Pratham’s Read India project has been catalysing learning on a mass scale throughout the country benefitting 2.5 million children last year. To supplement reading-writing skills that children learn through the Read India programme and to ensure that they don’t relapse into illiteracy, Pratham has established libraries in over 1,600 slum communities across the country including 527 in Mumbai. The commercial capital’s 527 slum libraries also serve as community centres for a host of activities related to language development.

Villa Theresa school students with slum children: mutual learning

Pratap and her colleagues at Pratham are pleasantly surprised by the bonhomie that has sprung up between the slum children and Villa Theresa students. Says Pratap: "Villa Theresa students display a lot of enthusiasm, innovation and keenness while interacting with Pratham children. In the guise of drama, music, story-telling, word games and even field trips, the mutual learning has been instructive and fun."

Adds Nandini Baijal, a class IX teacher at Villa Theresa: "The response I have received from my students as well as their parents for this project has been fantastic. Our school follows a system under which every class undertakes a social project every year. We wanted to get involved in an interactive experience from which children can learn something substantial. This is better than the usual donation of old clothes and toys and forgetting about it. Pratham has convinced us that privileged students must learn their responsibilities to society while becoming more socially sensitive. Our involvement in the Pratham project is educating them in these areas and my students and their families are enjoying the experience."

In turn, slum children — most of them enrolled in municipal schools apart from the Pratham library project, are also enthused. Says Kailash, a class IV student of the Worli Naka Municipal School: "I loved visiting the Birla Planetarium with Villa Theresa students who patiently explained the order of the universe to me."

Pratap hopes that Villa Theresa’s involvement initiative will be followed by other schools. "It would be worthwhile for managements of private schools to consider such interaction if they intend giving their students anything resembling a healthy education in which practical lessons in compassion and sharing play an important and mutually beneficial part," says Pratap.

School managements can contact Pratham at info@pratham.org or visit www.pratham.org.

Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)

Another task force

The Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), a statutory body under the Union ministry of human resource development, has constituted a task force to examine the recommendations of the U.R. Rao Committee which has reviewed the performance of AICTE and submitted two reports — Revitalising Technical Education (2003) and Promoting Excelle-nce in Education (March 2004) — to upgrade technical education countrywide.

The five-member committee constituted in November 2002 under the chairmanship of Prof. U.R. Rao, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), submitted its first report in September 2003 to the then Union HRD minister, the mercurial Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi. The recommendations of the report were not made public, but the controversy sparked off by Joshi’s proposal to slash tuition fees at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), supposedly on the recommendation of the U.R. Rao Committee, (an interpretation denied by Rao) brought it into media glare and sparked off a national debate.

The reports have made a number of recommendations to upgrade technical education consistent with the country’s economic development in the current globalised environment. AICTE’s task force has been briefed to respond to the observations made by the Rao reports which are reportedly highly critical of standards of technical education under AICTE supervision. The explosion in the number of technical institutions especially in the south, southwest and western regions fuelled by speculative rather than real demand and exploited by self-financing enterprises, has resulted in technical education expanding beyond sustainable levels, say the reports.

According to ministry sources, the committee has recommended much stricter control in licensing new institutions, and slowing down the proliferation of technical education institutes. "No further expansion of undergraduate (UG) technical institutions should be allowed and approvals for new institutions should be stopped for at least five years in states where the UG students’ intake exceeds the national average of 150 per million population," says the Rao committee.

Rao is reportedly critical of AICTE’s failure to regulate institutional growth to match industry demand and holds it responsible for the present state of affairs which has resulted in 90 percent of engineering graduates studying in non-accredited institutions. Though the AICTE was set up as an advisory body way back in 1945, and the expansion in technical education in the early years was done with the approval of the council and the government, the 1980s was a period of "free for all".

It was this state of affairs that led to the AICTE being transformed into a statutory body for planning, formulating and maintaining norms and standards in 1987. But despite this development, as the Rao committee observes, "a serious situation has arisen in recent years because of the mushrooming of a large number of private technical institutions and polytechnics. Barring some exceptions, there is scant regard for maintenance of standards".

Nevertheless the Rao committee’s reported recommendation to AICTE to slow down the growth of capacity expansion — AICTE currently supervises and monitors 1,265 engineering colleges, 958 B-schools, 1,034 MCA (Master of computer applications) institutes, 49 hotel management and 107 architecture colleges across the country which add 450,000 technical diploma holders and graduates to the national pool — is well made. Instead, the Rao committee recommends the use of hi-tech satellite communication and distance education technologies to simultaneously expand capacity and upgrade technical education. "With contemporary communi-cation and broadcast technologies it is perfectly feasible for 250 supplementary lectures to be recorded by the best professors and subject specialists according to the model syllabus of AICTE for each programme. These supplementary lectures can be broadcast via V-Sat systems to every college and institute to raise faculty and student standards. As I have detailed in my report to AICTE, the expense of setting up distance education infra-structure is only Rs.25 crore per year which can be recovered from students who will have to pay a mere Rs.1,000 per year extra. This is a workable model being used at the Strassbourg International Space University and MIT. Provision of high quality supplementary education nationwide offers the only hope of upgrading the quality of technical and B-school education in India," Rao told EducationWorld last year when intervie-wed for a cover story on AICTE (EW July 2004).

During the reign of Dr. Joshi in the HRD ministry, these valuable low cost recommendations of the Rao committee were ignored. Within academia there’s new hope that they will be heeded by the Congress-led UPA government. But the setting up of another task force to examine the reports has an ominous death-knell ring about it.

Autar Nehru (Delhi)

Campus politics impasse

Campus politics in Kerala (pop. 32 million) has taken a murky turn with students and college manage-ments crossing swords over the staging of college and university union elections. The minority of serious scholars are worried about the outcome of this confrontation which has already led to closure of several colleges across the state.

Elections in colleges are usually held in August on a date specified by each of Kerala’s four universities — Kannur, Kozhikode, Mahatma Gandhi and Kerala — which have an aggregate of 175,000 students on their muster rolls. They weren’t held last year (2004) in most colleges affiliated with the Kerala and Mahatma Gandhi universities because of disagreements between college managements and student unions.

The disagreement is over the process of elections. College managements insist upon class-wise or indirect elections while students want direct elections. Under the college managements’ proposal, each class or batch of students will elect their representatives who will in turn elect student union office bearers such as the president, secretary, treasurer etc. On the other hand students prefer to elect union office bearers directly.

While colleges affiliated with Kozhikode and Kannur universities, all government and some private colleges under the other two universities have already succumbed to student pressure, the managements of some colleges affiliated with the Mahatma Gandhi and Kerala universities with the support of All Kerala Private College Managements Association (AKPCMA) and College Principals Association, have resisted student pressure for direct elections because of excessive politici-sation of campus environments.

However university unions affiliated to major political parties, including the Congress and BJP, have formed a joint action council to lead the struggle for protecting the democratic rights of students. "We will not allow the colleges to function if they go ahead with class-wise elections. We are well aware that private college managements are attempting to pack college unions with their own men, to protect their commercial interests," says T.V. Rajesh, state president of the CPM-affiliated Students Federation of India (SFI).

Likewise college managements too are digging in their heels. "We won’t be cowed by threats. In the Sajan Francis Case the Kerala high court banned campus elections on political lines and the Supreme Court has dismissed the students’ plea for a stay of the high court order. If the students want direct elections let them convince the apex court," says Fr. Mathew Maleparampil, general secretary of AKPCMA.

The firm stand of the Mahatma Gandhi and Kerala universities as also of private college managements is because a growing number of people including politicians, sought the high court’s intervention following steady deterioration of campus politics in the state. "The student leaders who are pressing for direct elections are not students, they are non-student leaders engaged by parties to implement their agendas on college campuses. We will not allow such men to enter our premises," says Fr. Mathew.

There’s considerable substance in Mathew’s assertion because all major political parties in the state have students’ organisations affiliated with them. Therefore the parent parties nominate candidates for college and university unions to catch ’em young. Unsurprisingly electoral campaigns are fought as vigorously as the Lok Sabha and state assembly elections.

In some campuses, the dominant student unions deny other organisations the freedom to conduct events and activities without union consent. On several occasions this has led to bloodshed on campus. In 1983 Simon Britto a pro-Congress student activist was stabbed four times, through his lung, spinal cord, liver and oesophagus on the premises of the prestigious Maharaja’s College in Ernakulam. Since then spiralling campus violence has steadily stoked the demand for curbs on campus politics.

"We cannot blame the court for the judgement. It was concerned with the growing violence on campuses. Most student unions use campuses for serving the narrow interests of the political parties to which they owe allegiance," says P.T. Thomas, a former president of the Congress-affiliated Kerala Students Union (KSU) and member of the state’s legislative assembly. Nevertheless Thomas does not fully agree with the court order banning political activities and believes there should be space for "healthy political activities on campuses" in the interests of democracy.

The major objective of Kerala’s student politicians and unions is to ensure that higher education continues to be heavily subsidised. Arguments such as unmerited subsidies and the like cut little ice in India’s most literate state in which left wing rhetoric dominates political discourse. Which is why even academics steer clear of this thorny issue. Their argument against mainstream party involvement in campus politics is that the high court order does not infringe the constitutional rights of students. They argue that the court has restricted — not abolished — political activities on campus. Students are free to indulge in them beyond college campus, like other citizens.

T.K. Devasia (Thiruvananthapuram)