Education News

Crumbling school system

Government primary school in Lucknow: low priority

Unsurprisingly in end November, the roof of a school building in Lucknow’s Dayaram Purva locality came crashing down, seriously injuring two students. In Lucknow district which hosts 1,686 dilapidated schools with 3.69 lakh students, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

Following a public outcry, the city education officer Pankaj Gupta ordered that students of 13 primary schools in decrepit buildings be shifted to neighbouring schools within 24 hours. But the order itself prompted further protest because some of the endan-gered schools had enrollments of over 400. This consideration had aborted a similar order issued three years ago.

"It takes time to build schools. We are doing the best we can. In many instances the children themselves don’t want to move to new schools fearing that the commuting distance will be too much," says Gupta who prefers not to comment about a promise made by him last August to repair school buildings that were compromising the safety of students.

But it’s possible this was because the quality of repairs don’t inspire much confidence. In 2002 the education department decided that a primary school building in the city’s Chinhat suburb was too dangerous for its 200 students. So Rs.1.5 lakh was expended to set up a new building next door. However the school continues to function from its old premises as the peeling plaster, cracked floors and walls and falling concrete of the new structure make it more unsafe than the older one. Moreover the building had only two classrooms which meant classes would have to be held in the portico as well.

Unsafe buildings isn’t the only problem plaguing UP’s primary schools which have a modest Rs. 12.93 crore budget for civil works for the financial year 2005-06. Shortage of teachers and support staff is another chronic problem. Over 200 schools in Lucknow are single teacher institutions. In Varanasi, 1,082 primary schools have just 4,272 teachers between them. In schools that function in Dalit dominated areas, students are often asked to double up as sweepers and peons.

Comments a dispirited teacher: "Can you imagine a school where a single teacher teaches all subjects to all classes while the headmaster remains busy with administrative work? These children come from poor families and don’t have a supportive home study environment. We aren’t able to provide it here either. There is no electricity and our students have to sit on worn-out mattresses. We have made so many complaints to the education department, but nothing comes of it."

It’s the same story elsewhere. In Lucknow’s neighbouring Faizabad district, Rs.1 crore is allocated annually for running primary schools. But most school buildings are either incomplete or unsafe. Faizabad’s shiksha adhikari (education officer), Devi Sahay Tiwari admits that school buildings are in bad shape. "But why blame us. The funds come in a trickle. How are we to attend to all the schools?" he asks.

Education department officials concede that the problem is huge but insist that they are serious about finding solutions. One proposed solution is to construct new buildings on government land in the vicinity of endangered schools. A beginning will shortly be made by implementing this plan in Kanpur, Agra, Allahabad, Varanasi and Lucknow.

But Gupta says that a long-term solution needs to be found. "Seven schools have complied with the order to shift temporarily. This is a good beginning. But we have to come up with a permanent solution before the start of the next academic year. Students cannot suffer this ad hoc arrangement forever. Many futures are at stake," he says.

A fine statement of intent, no doubt. But if a permanent solution to the problem of Uttar Pradesh’s crumbling government schools is to be found, education will have to move to a higher rank on the Samajwadi government’s list of priorities.

Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)

Crunch time for private schools

Close on the heels of the high court-ordered drive of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to demolish illegally constructed buildings in the national capital which has hit the middle class hard, another court order has added to the worry lines of this segment of the population. Four private schools have been given time until January 31 to explain to the Delhi high court why they haven’t admitted a single student under the freeship clause of their lease agreements with the city’s sole land custodian, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA).

Also in the gun sights of the court are 33 other private schools which have neglected to honour a promise given to the MCD and the high court on this score. Included among them are the India Today promoted Vasant Valley School; Mother’s International School; DPS, Dwarka and Birla Vidya Niketan. Meanwhile although the Delhi press has reported that lease agreements of four schools — Pinnacle School run by Babs Noronha Educational Society, Gyan Mandir Education Society School, Rukmani Devi School and the Bal Bharti School (Pitampura) — have been cancelled, and that DDA has directed MCD to take over these schools under the Public Premises Eviction Act, EW learns that they have been given a last chance to comply with the Delhi high court’s order of 2004. "The final decision of the court is yet to come. The court would like to know what efforts in terms of inviting poor students to apply for admission, have been made. School managements will have to explain," says Usha Ram principal of Laxman Public School and chairperson of the National Progressive Schools Conference, an association of 102 private schools in the national capital region.

Social Jurist, the Delhi-based NGO which brought the issue of private school managements violating their contracts with DDA to national attention, is pleased with the judicial activism. "These schools have been cheating the public for the past 20 years. Now the court has turned the heat on the government, which unfortunately over the years has been protecting the interests of these schools rather than of the public. But while the latest developments are welcome, our struggle is not over yet," says Ashok Aggarwal, convener of Social Jurist.

Aggarwal: welcome action

Meanwhile with the 104th Constitution Amendment Bill passed by the Lok Sabha in the just concluded winter session of Parliament bringing all educational institutions under the ambit of reservations, private schools in Delhi are apprehensive that reservation for poor neighbourhood children could rise to 50 percent. Private school promoters complain that with DDA having monopoly over land in the national capital region, their contracts were unequal agreements and school promoters had no choice but to agree to the conditions laid by the authority. Nor are heads of the capital’s private schools convinced that forced induction of underprivileged children into posh private schools will benefit enrolled or prospective students.

Comments Usha Ram: "We are concerned about poverty as a barrier to social equity and have devised our own practical programmes to do our bit. We train slum children and even adults to spread education in their areas and about 100 of them come to our school every afternoon to study. We help children with their studies and those who can be integrated are admitted. This is a delicate process and we must understand it cannot be a numbers game."

But Ashok Aggarwal believes that such arguments which were advanced in the high court and rejected, are mere delaying tactics. "These are all excuses indicating school manage-ments’ lack of sincerity," he says.

Meanwhile with the new January 31 deadline set by the court fast approaching, it’s clear that private schools which contracted to admit poor students in exchange for concessional land grants will have to admit them. Although the Right to Education Bill, 2005 imposes a similar obligation on all private schools, the Bill is yet to be enacted. Therefore other schools have more time to ready themselves to dilute their elite status.

Autar Nehru (Delhi)

Painful passage to India

Whereas the aggregate expenditure of students fleeing abroad from India’s second tier colleges is estimated at more than Rs.9,000 crore annually and forecast to rise to Rs.40,000 crore by 2015, educrats in the Union HRD ministry at the Centre or in the states seem unconcerned about augmenting the flow of foreign students into Indian education institutions. Indeed the processes and procedures foreign students have to clear to enter institutions of higher learning in India can be quite painful.

The experience of Syed Rafay Ali, (17) who made history this year by becoming reportedly the first Pakistani student to come to India for higher (Plus Two) study was particularly trying. An erstwhile student of Beacon House School, Islamabad, Ali cleared the entrance test of the United World College (UWC) in February and surprised his family by opting to study in the Mahindra United World College of India (MUWCI), Pune. MUWCI (estb.1997) is one of the ten colleges worldwide under the United World Colleges banner that offers the IB (International Baccalaureate) two-year study programme. The college houses 200 students instructed by an international faculty of 25 on its state-of-the-art fully residential campus, 40 km from Pune.

"I wanted to experience India as hostility between our two countries is becoming history and Indo-Pak relations have improved dramatically," says Ali explaining his decision to study in India. "Moreover I was aware that MUWCI’s IB programme has attracted students from over 70 countries."

Despite widespread media hype about improved Indo-Pak relations, the waiting period Ali had to endure was longer than of any student admitted into the pricey (Rs.5.5 lakh per year) Pune-based college promoted by the late Harish Mahindra in collaboration with UWC. Although the process of initiating clearances to enable him to enter India began early this year, it took almost eight months for Ali’s papers to be cleared, despite a flurry of activity in the national executive committees of UWC in Islamabad and Mumbai, and in the Indian and Pakistani embassies. By the time Ali finally made it to Pune, classes had already commenced. Moreover the visa issued to him is only for a year and confines his movements to Mumbai and Pune. The need to constantly report to the Pune police, one of the conditions of the visa, is an additional irritant.

Despite the secretariat of the college having to work overtime on Ali’s case, the MUWCI management believes that this popular student is worth the trouble. "Such students bring a truly global feel to our campus," says Dr. David Wilkinson, the school’s principal.

Following his feel-good experience of MUWCI, Ali believes it is safe for two of his friends back home to apply for admission later this year. He also has a suggestion for accelerating the Indo-Pak rapprochement. "Bollywood has a huge fan following in Pakistan. If Indian movie stars come across to spread the message of friendship, things will move fast," he opines.

With the nation’s laid-back educrats showing no urgency to balance the swelling outflow of Indian students fleeing abroad, quite obviously the onus of attracting foreign students into India has devolved upon college managements. But before the current inward trickle becomes a flood, they will need to get their act together and upgrade their institutions. And that’s a tall order.

Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)

Hasty populism?

A Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) circular issued last September directing its 6,370 affiliated schools to provide free education to girls from one-child households studying in classes VI to XII, has set the dovecots of CBSE schools in Tamil Nadu aflutter. Moreover the Delhi-based board has directed affiliated schools to provide 50 percent fee concession to each girl child if a family has two girl children.

Quite obviously the board which is directly controlled by the Union human resource deve-lopment ministry is serious about enforcing this order of the ministry. It has already made an amendment to this effect in its affiliation bye-laws, and schools have been asked to implement the order with effect from April 2006, failing which punitive action will be taken against them.

CBSE spokespersons in Chennai say that the circular is prompted by the HRD ministry which is concerned about demographic imbalances indicating a heavily skewed sex ratio, with males incrementally outnumbering women especially in Delhi, Punjab and Haryana. Ministry officials believe that focused emphasis on educating the girl child will also help to root out the practice of female foeticide and diminish social prejudice against girl children.

However the circular makes it clear that neither the Central nor state governments will subsidise the new scheme. School managements will have to resort to cross-subsidisation to meet the increased cost of providing free and/ or concessional education for girl children. According to a HRD ministry official, a sample survey carried out among CBSE schools in Delhi has proved that affiliated schools will be comfortably able to bear a slight drop in their incomes, as very few girls in CBSE schools are from single child households.

The CBSE’s September 22 circular has also evoked heated discussion among school principals in the city who say the scheme has several loopholes. "Many nuclear families today have only one child and a school may find that it has to provide free education to a few hundred single girl children. The resultant revenue loss to schools will be substantial," says S. Bhavanishankar, principal, Chettinad Vidyashram, Chennai, one of the largest schools in the city with over 6,500 students.

Meanwhile the Delhi-based Inde-pendent Schools Federation of India is planning to move the courts against this directive. According to the federation’s vice-president (Tamil Nadu), R. Kishore Kumar who is also senior principal of the upscale St. John’s International Residential School in Chennai, the scheme is wrongly targeting CBSE affiliated schools whose students tend to be from affluent families which can afford to pay the prescribed tuition fees. "Far from benefiting deserving girl students, this move will only serve to disturb the male-female ratio in schools and could even prompt some of them to convert into all-boys schools," he says.

Quite evidently the pro-girl bias of mandarins of the HRD ministry and its hand maiden CBSE, is well-intentioned. But if they believe they can at one stroke eliminate pervasive prejudice against girl children, promote girls education and set everything right, they are living in fools paradise. It is pertinent to note that the order is applicable to a mere 6,370 CBSE-affiliated schools, where the number of girls from one child households is likely to be very small.

At best this is populist tokenism which may help the left-leaning Union HRD minister to look good. But as the comments of experienced educationists quoted above indicate, such hasty populism could well harm the cause it seeks to help.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)

Cabinet turmoil

A peculiar tangle has tied up higher education in West Bengal in knots. First, the good news: there’s a possibility of FDI (foreign direct investment) pouring into the state’s crumbling higher education sector. The bad news is that the intelligentsia is convinced that the leftist higher education sector is not mature enough to make efficient use of FDI, if and when it materialises. Another complicating factor is that all’s not well between the cabinet and higher education minister Prof. Satya Sadhan Chakraborty.

In mid-December, carefully leaked news from Writers Building Kolkata (which houses the secretariat) indicated that West Bengal’s neo-communist chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya delivered a 20-minute tongue lashing to Chakraborty at a cabinet meeting for resisting the idea of permitting FDI into institutions of higher education. Bhatta-charya reportedly told Chakraborty that he "had done nothing" to improve the standard of higher education in West Bengal.

"How many modern subjects have you introduced in the last five years?" Bhattacharya reportedly asked the minister, who was also chided for neglecting science and technology education. To add to Chakraborty’s discomfiture, he was unfavourably compared with his cabinet colleague in charge of school education, Kanti Biswas.

The upshot of the stormy cabinet meeting was that Chakraborty will have to submit a list of colleges where science and technology programmes have been upgraded and new posts created in universities.

Bhattacharya: tongue lashing

Unsurprisingly, though a hardcore leftist, Chakraborty now takes pains to explain why FDI in higher education is necessary. "Around 90 percent of West Bengal’s Rs.700 crore annual higher education budget is spent on the salaries and pensions of academics and non-teaching staff. Too little is left to fulfil other needs. It is not possible for the government alone to improve education. Therefore, foreign investment is necessary," he says, glossing over the neat volte face from his position a few years ago.

According to Chakraborty, a large number of US and other western universities have approached the state government seeking investment opportunities. Their "applications" are currently being assessed by a monitoring committee of the higher education department. However the quantum of investment proposed has shrunk dramatically, inasmuch as only Rs.1,000 crore is expected against "thousands of crores" promised earlier.

Political pundits in Kolkata believe that under Bhattacharya’s Deng Xiaoping-style leadership, the CPM-led Left Front will win the electorate’s endorsement for a record seventh time in succession. But they are certain that in the new government, Prof. Satya Sadhan Chakraborty won’t be the minister of higher education.

Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)

Academic jitters

The struggle between politicians and academics to control Karnataka’s universities and institutions of higher education is poised on a knife-edge. The Congress-led coalition government has proposed an amendment to the Karnataka State Universities (KSU) Act, 2000 in the current winter session of the legislature which will empower it to inject any person or persons who have "served the cause of education" into the governing syndicates of the state’s seven universities which have an estimated aggregate enrollment of 700,000 students.

Early last year (May) Bangalore University (BU) vice chancellor Dr. M.S. Thimmappa rejected six nominees of the state government to the varsity’s syndicate on the ground that they were not "eminent educationists" as stipulated by s.28 of the KSU Act. "The syndicate is a powerful body and decisions regarding land acquisition, admission, intake, recruitment, affiliation, etc are taken by its members. Its members must be eminent educationists of proven capability," says Thimmappa.

Dr. M. I. Savadatti, former vice chancellor of Mangalore University and a member of the Karnataka government’s task force for higher education which submitted its recommendations for higher education reform in November 2004, is equally indignant. "I don’t understand how the government can assume that university campuses are a place for politicians. In our task force’s report we proposed removal of all constraints upon academic work in universities. The government has done just the opposite. The governor who in his capacity as chancellor of all state universities can refuse to clear the amendment Bill, is the last hope," says Savadatti.

The die-hard determination of state politicians to appoint their handpicked nominees in university syndicates is driven by the awareness that s. 29 of the KSU Act empowers each syndicate "to manage the affairs of the university, in particular to administer the funds and properties, to enter into, vary, carry out and cancel contracts on behalf of the university… to make recommendations regarding admission of colleges to affiliation," among other privileges.

The fact that the 2003-04 budget of Bangalore University — reputedly the largest in Asia with 400,000 students in 375 affiliated colleges — is Rs.95 crore, provides one clue as to why there is a scramble among all and sundry to serve the cause of higher education via university syndicates. Likewise the annual budgets of some of Karnataka’s other universities are: Karnatak University: Rs.58 crore, and Kuvempu University: Rs.31 crore.

Yet despite these huge annual budgetary outlays, it’s common knowledge that Karnataka’s state government funded universities have suffered steep decline in academic standards and reputation during the past four decades. This is attributed to progressively incremental government interference in institutions of higher education, especially in matters related to faculty appointments for which there are informal but strict, caste-based quotas. Now there is widespread apprehension that the state government’s attempt to pack university syndicates could prove to be the proverbial last straw.

Perhaps the state government’s dismal record in managing primary education in the state has prompted this belated resistance to political encroachment into academia. A recently released report of the National Literacy Mission (NLM) indicates that Karnataka (pop. 57 million) hosts over 15 million — 9.6 million women and 5.5 million men — complete illiterates. A first time map of the most illiterate districts countrywide identifies 150 districts across the country as ‘most backward’. Four of Karnataka’s 27 districts — Gulbarga, Raichur, Bidar and Bijapur — are included in the 150.

With a political class with this primary education record making plain its intent to expand its reach into higher education, it’s unsurprising that the small surviving minority of independent academics are getting the jitters. About time too.

Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore)