Anybody with a modicum of common sense knows that what’s wrong with post-independence India’s education system, is the dismal condition of the country’s 1.20 million government — especially state and local government — schools where teachers ritually go through the motions and little learning happens. Defined by crumbling buildings, furniture-less classrooms, lack of electricity and drinking water, unusable toilets and chronic teacher absenteeism (1.25 million government school teachers are absent every day), failed government schools are the prime cause of mass illiteracy, poverty and poor productivity, the dominant features of the Indian economy.
Unable or unwilling to do the right thing by government schools, latterly the education establishment — taking a cue from its success in reserving massive government quotas in private institutions of professional education (engineering and medical colleges) — has resorted to passing on its responsibility to provide public education to private schools. The landmark Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 made it mandatory for private unaided (financially independent) schools to reserve 25 percent capacity in elementary classes (I-VIII) for children from poor households in their neighbourhood. Simultaneously, it has been propagating public-private partnerships (PPPs) inviting corporates, philanthropists and NGOs to help in the upgradation and management of failing government schools. But the PPPs in school education haven’t taken off because the state and local governments have been attempting to foist unequal partnerships on private education providers.
Against this background, a new PPP model which has radically transformed the once rundown all-girls class V-XII Government Vocational Higher Secondary School, Nadakavvu (GVHSS-N) in Kozhikode, Kerala — India’s most literate state — offers the hope of revival and rejuvenation of government schools on a mass scale. A detailed account of how this failing government school has been transformed into Kerala’s most famous public school and a model for PPPs in education, is offered in our cover story. The metamorphosis of GVHSS-N is so dramatic and so welcomed by children from the bottom deciles of the population, that your editor’s eyes albeit unused to the melting mood, were severely tested.
And to write our equally detailed second lead feature in this issue, managing editor Summiya Yasmeen reconstructed a confused story abandoned by an absconded correspondent, to recount how a brave and timely initiative to overhaul and improve the obsolete undergrad study programmes of Delhi University, ended in a shambles and disaster.
