The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education is reviewing the current system of awarding 25 grace marks to class X students for sports excellence. The argument being advanced in favour of scrapping this incentive is that there’s already a 3 percent reserved quota for outstanding sportspersons in junior colleges in the state. “We are debating it. No decision has been taken as yet. However a committee has been set up to discuss the issue,” says S. Dekhane, secretary of the board.
Sports educationists, coaches, trainers etc in India’s most industrialised state (pop. 112 million) despair about yet another initiative to downgrade the importance of sports education. According to a 2008 government resolution, the sports quota in junior colleges was to be 5 percent, but was reduced to 3 percent in 2010 with the remaining 2 percent being allotted to students with excellent co-curricular achievement. To qualify for admission into the state’s junior colleges under the sports quota, a class X student should have won or been a runner-up in a district, state or national sports event. Under this arrangement, out of 265,052 seats in junior colleges in Maharashtra, 4,634 are reserved for sportspersons currently.
“The 3 percent quota for sports-persons is grossly inadequate. For instance in football, only one of 100 players is likely to have national-level potential. Therefore, if we need 30 good players there has to be a pool of at least 3,000 football players who need to be trained in junior and undergraduate colleges. This arithmetic is applicable to hockey, cricket and athletics as well. Against this dismal backdrop it’s ridiculous to drop the 25 grace marks system for outstanding sportspersons,” says K.M. Azhar, member, I-League and former honorary secretary of the Western India Football Association.
According to informed educationists in Maharashtra where junior college and undergrad education standards have slipped precipitously during the past few decades, the decision to reduce the intake of sportspersons in colleges is the natural outcome of decades of negligible investment in developing the infrastructure of government and aided colleges, especially co-curricular and sports education facilities. Therefore even if high-potential sportspersons are admitted into the state’s 6,766 junior and undergrad colleges, they won’t have practice and play facilities.
“Only a few private schools and colleges run by Catholic and other religious trusts boast minimal sports facilities. As far as government schools are concerned, even for their annual sports day they have to hire play-grounds. The condition of colleges is even worse. Ninety-five percent of colleges in Mumbai don’t have play-grounds, and surprisingly Mumbai University is the only varsity in the entire country not to have a sports director,” says R.G. More, sports director, St. Andrew’s College, Mumbai, which admitted 43 students under the sports reserved quota category last year.
In the Beijing Olympics 2008, the People’s Republic of China won 100 medals — 51 gold, 21 silver and 28 bronze. In comparison, Indian athletes won only three medals — one gold and two bronze. Between 1896 and 2011 India has participated in 31 Olympic Games and won a total of 20 medals. QED.
Manas Shrivastava (Mumbai)
Other India schools
A survey of 270 of the 299 primary schools (classes I-VII) run by the Pune Municipal Corpor-ation’s (PMC’s) Municipal School Education Board (MSEB) has shocked the academic community and citizenry, though not in equal proportion.
Initiated by MSEB member Bala Shedge, a commerce graduate of the Ness Wadia College of Commerce who is a PMC corporator and civic activist spearheading education reform, the survey was conducted by MSEB board officials who visited the 270 schools in the city. The surveyors found 201 of them housed unusable toilets, with 180 broken urinals and 305 broken doors (including some in toilets and classrooms). Moreover, 287 water pipelines were non-functional and 415 taps and 125 broken gates needed repair.
According to the survey, no repair work was carried out by PMC in any MSEB school over the two-month vacation period prior to commencement of the new school year on June 15. According to Ramchandra Jadhav, administrative officer, MSEB, since the survey report was submitted in the third week of May, it left very little time to initiate the required repairs. Side-stepping the question as to why the PMC/MSEB had not conducted the annual maintenance and repairs exercise in the board’s schools during the vacation period, Jadhav said: “We have now given instructions to the ward offices to complete the work by July 15.”
However, Shedge is sceptical about any worthwhile maintenance and repair work being completed by the July 15 deadline. “It takes a long time to install new pipes, clean water tanks, etc. Given the PMC’s lethargy, children in the MSEB’s 299 primaries will have to make do as usual,” he says.
Manish Shroff, member-activist of the Action for the Rights of the Child, an umbrella organisation of 30 NGOs working in the field of child rights, is equally dismissive about PMC’s job-secure and lethargic employees working overtime to improve school infrastructure for children from poor and socially disadvantaged households. “A survey we conducted in 2009 also indicated that in 48 percent of MSEB schools, toilets were non-functional, while 38 percent didn’t have taps in working condition. Tiny children are cramped into dirty, unhygienic municipal schools. This is a clear violation of their fundamental right to free and compulsory education,” he says.
But even as education activists and NGOs cry themselves hoarse about the insalubrious conditions in MSEB schools and the health risk they pose to children, the collective conscience of PMC councillors and the middle class who wouldn’t dream of sending their children to corporation schools, is unmoved. With more than five private schools now under construction in Pune in addition to those already in existence, middle class households have multiple options to choose from.
“A corporation school by popular definition implies the lack of basic facilities. This has always been the case. While the PMC spends taxpayers’ money on grand political functions and ceremonies, it has neither time nor the inclination to improve or change its own schools. And politicians and government babus know fully well that poor parents can’t do anything about it,” says Anil Kamble, a teacher at a PMC school.
The more things change in shining India, the more they remain the same for the poor in the other India.
Huned Contractor (Pune)