Although the western sea-board state of Gujarat (pop. 62.7 million) is endowed with an entrepreneurial and international trading tradition of several millennia, it has not been able to overtake neighbouring Maharashtra as the country’s most industrialised state. Knowledgable observers of the national development scenario believe that a major factor behind Gujarat being obliged to play second fiddle to Maharashtra is the neglect of English learning by almost all governments of the state because of misinterpretation of the call of the Porbandar (Gujarat)-born Mahatma Gandhi for swadeshi nationalism and development.
“Gujaratis are rubbish at English. But the state does nothing to make the lower middle classes competitive in the lang-uage. In Gujarat’s government-run schools, students are denied English as a subject until class V, meaning age 10 which is too late. The Congress has supported introduction of English earlier, but the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reject this. The upper castes, BJP supporters almost to a man, are fine with this policy, because they are business-oriented and don’t need these skills. It is the children of Gujarat’s poor who are cruelly denied opportunity… and have little means of escape through language…” opines Aakar Patel, the well-known insightful columnist (Mint Lounge, October 13).
Although Patel also criticises Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s incumbent three-term chief minister and the BJP’s prime ministerial nominee for the 2014 general election, of subscribing to this RSS/BJP prejudice against English language learning, there are indications that Modi has had second thoughts on the subject. In his third term which began when the BJP swept the state assembly election of December 2012, Modi has initiated several measures to remedy the situation. One of them is to encourage civic municipal corporations in the state to promote affordable English-medium primary-secondaries for the general public.
“A pilot primary school was promoted in Shahpur area of Ahmedabad in May last year and encouraged by its success we plan to add five more,” says Jagdish Bhavsar, chairman of the municipal school board of the BJP-ruled Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC). The corporation-run English medium schools are named Ahmedabad Public Schools (APS) and will start functioning from the start of the new academic year 2014-15.
The pilot APS, Shahpur, which started off with kindergarten classes and added class I of primary school, has already admitted 150 students since it was inaugurated on May 13 last year. Before the commencement of the new academic year, it expects to admit another 100 students. Members of AMC’s school board say that a growing number of parents have been representing to chief minister Modi for AMC to establish affordable English medium schools which “don’t fleece people with exorbitant fees and forced donations”.
Currently AMC’s school board manages 456 Gujarati medium primaries with an aggregate enrollment of 160,000 students. Therefore AMC’s ‘diversif-ication’ into English medium primaries is being keenly watched for replication by the civic corporations of Vadodara, Surat, Rajkot, Junagadh, Jamnagar and Bhavnagar.
Although perhaps inevitably, the state government has woken up late to the damage English illiteracy has done to industrial and socio-economic devel-opment in the state, Gujarat’s savvy post-liberalisation middle class has been quick to discern the advantages of English literacy. In the new millennium a host of new capital-intensive day schools (Eklavya, DPS, Udgam in Ahmedabad), boarding (Atmiya Vidya Mandir, Surat) and international schools (Riverside, Mahatma Gandhi International and Ahmedabad Inter-national) among others, have sprung up in Gujarat offering high-end K-12 education at prices unheard in the history of the state.
Dr. Jayesh Thakkar, chairman of the Research Committee of the Gujarat Textbook Board and a former member of the Gujarat University Syndicate, welcomes the belated initiative of the state government to make English medium education available to the masses at the bottom of the state’s socio-economic pyramid. “This initi-ative will go a long way in enabling Gujarat’s skilled artisans and workers to market their skills beyond state borders. It’s a welcome even if belated development,” says Thakkar declining to comm-ent on the causes and effects of the anti-English prejudice of successive state governments.
Perhaps now Gujarat can begin the process of closing the industrial development gap which obliges it to play second fiddle to neighbouring Maharashtra.
R.K. Misra (Gandhinagar)