Education News

Children’s charter

The global campaign for education (GCE) action week formally launched in Uttar Pradesh on April 19, 2004 in partnership with committed non-government organisations including Action Aid, Oxfam, Unicef, Plan India, Care UP, Catholic Relief Services, North India and the Beti Foundation, though ignored by the media, made a huge impact upon the academic community in India’s most populous and educationally backward state.

Girl students in UP: amazing first-hand accounts

The theme of this year’s GCE week of action was ‘missing children’ from education. Over the years GCE has morphed into the world’s biggest lobby for education, endorsed by United Nations organisations — Unesco, ILO and Unicef. The campaign stresses that free and compulsory elementary education is a state responsibility and aims to mobilise $8 billion (Rs.36,000 crore) worldwide for basic education. This amount, campaigners say, is equal to a mere four days of the world’s annual military spending, 20 percent of what Europeans spend on ice-cream annually and 16 percent of American spending on tobacco every year.

The formal launch of the campaign was preceded by an extensive 20-day mapping exercise conducted in 15 Uttar Pradesh districts. Among the major reasons identified for low school enrollments were early girl marriages, unsafe school environ-ments, far flung schools, uninteresting curricula, unfriendly teachers who impose fees and fines upon students, and lack of basic amenities like toilets and drinking water. The distinctive aspect of the campaign was that direct interaction between children and government officials and policy makers was facilitated, with children encouraged to voice their problems and offer solutions.

"It is not poverty that causes illiteracy but the other way round. Education gives people the skills to work their way out of poverty. Schooling in India has remained a dream for so many children not because of poverty and illiteracy but because of lack of political will. GCE Education Week is a reminder that 100 million children around the world are out of the education system. According to UN figures, a quarter of those children are in India," says R.K. Rai, a GCE activist.

At a special programme in Lucknow conducted by GCE activists for interaction with the media, 80 children from 15 districts of UP offered first hand accounts of the difficulties of acquiring school education in India’s most populous state. Twelve-year-old Hussian who lives just 15 km beyond Lucknow told astonished media persons that he has never seen a blackboard. And though he claims a special affinity for cricket, Hussian has never heard of Sachin Tendulkar. For ten-year-old Soni from Barabanki, the care of younger siblings takes precedence over education although she has learned to write her name from luckier neighbour-hood children who attend school.

Another 13-year-old recounted a few happy years he had spent in a village school until the sole teacher resigned, forcing closure of the school. Nine-year-old Mariam defended her parents’ decision not to send her to school. "Everyone knows that it’s boys who need to study," she declared before the assembly.

The weeklong event concluded with the presentation of a children’s charter of demands to the governor of Uttar Pradesh on April 26. The charter demands free, quality education till 18 years of age, free textbooks, state responsibility for education, board and lodging for destitute children and setting up of national and state level commissions for children. The charter also implores the Union govern-ment to ratify ILO convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour (1999) and ILO convention 138 on the minimum age of employment (1973).

Other demands include an end to communal violence and tensions so that children are able to enjoy their childhood while acquiring an education with the recommendation that the government should reduce defence and subsidies expenditure to raise primary education allocations. It also demands that in matters relating to children, children themselves should be allowed to participate and government should seek their views and opinions.

In a nation which has callously ignored its children for centuries, the GCE Education Week children’s charter was undoubtedly too utopian. But it needed to be written.

Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)

Delay as usual

Declaration of the results of the secondary and higher secondary examinations conducted by the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education and West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education respectively in March, are likely to be delayed. Consequently the 595,233 students who wrote the exams might become ineligible for admission to colleges in other states where admissions would have closed.

In sharp contrast the Delhi-based Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations, declared its ICSE and ISC exam results nationwide in mid-May, two weeks ahead of schedule. And despite some exams being re-scheduled because of question paper leakages, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) announced the results of its school leavers (classes X and XII) on May 26.

The West Bengal Council cites elections as the reason for the delay. "Several examiners reported they couldn’t complete correction of answer scripts because they were away on election duty," says the council’s deputy secretary (examinations) Gopa Basu. According to her, hundreds of schoolteachers were commandeered on election duty for 15 days at a stretch. However teachers in all other states too, were similarly deployed. But in Marxist ruled West Bengal the deadline of May 11 for all examiners to submit corrected answer scripts came and went almost unnoticed. Worse, a new deadline wasn’t set. "We are purposely not deciding on another deadline because that may delay the process further," says Basu.

Nor are the auguries good. Higher secondary science practicals have been postponed in several centres causing panic in many homes. This is confirmed by the council’s president Jyotirmoy Mukhopadhyay. "We have yet to complete practical examinations in several schools. Though May 15 was scheduled as the last date for practicals, they could not be completed as several schools were converted into polling stations and were preoccupied with election-related work even five days after closure of voting. Naturally these schools had to postpone their practical examin-ations and are yet to send us their marks."

In addition there’s the fear of manifold errors in declared results. Regular readers of EducationWorld may recall a Kolkata despatch reporting errors in marksheets of higher secondary students with as many as 19 candidates being erroneously awarded nil marks in certain subjects (EW September 2003). With no rational argument available for its defence, the state government was forced to apologise, albeit grudgingly, blaming an unidentified "computer virus" for the egregious blunder.

Moreover last year scores of distraught students and parents had marched in protest against what they alleged were haphazard and negligent evaluation practices. Many students had been awarded less than 45 percent in a paper, but had scored high marks in the other papers of the same subject. While the government had ordered the re-evaluation of answer papers, there’s no evidence of any heads rolling in the board or the council. According to reliable sources, this year the board and council have appointed 2,000 extra examiners and 544 additional examiners respectively, to ensure that no examiner has to evaluate more scripts than he/ she can cope with.

Last year, the results were announced on July18. Quite obviously they will be further delayed this year. Explains a board official: "It takes at least six weeks for the board to scrutinise and re-check marksheets after head examiners submit them to us."

Optimists say that a delay of at least a fortnight is inevitable — i.e end July or at worse early August. Given that many school-leavers from West Bengal plan to join undergraduate courses in other parts of the country and not a few are planning to go abroad for higher education, the babus of the examination boards under little pressure to perform, have given them a raw deal. As usual.

Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)

Expanding corruption circle

Like a bizarre soap opera, characterised by a strange cast and stranger twists and turns of plot, the All-India Pre-Medical Test (AIPMT) papers leak scandal has had the nation agog for two months as it played itself out across a pan-Indian stage. The scandal broke in April following leakage of question papers of this exam conducted annually by the Delhi-based Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) three days before the exam was to be held in 424 centres in 34 cities. Following discovery of the leakage, the exam scheduled to be written by 250,000 students on April 11, was cancelled and re-written on April 19 amid unprecedented security.

CAT exam paper accused Ranjit Singh: national crime syndicate

Subsequent investigations by the CBI and police have thrown more light on the modus operandi of the racketeers who have engineered a nation-wide ‘business’ in the procurement, purchase and sale of public examination papers. According to the police, Gautam would charge a negotiable fee of between Rs.7-10 lakh (payable in installments) from each student for the PMT question paper. His ‘business’ was run through a web of contacts in the CBSE office, coaching centres and parents with overvaulting ambitions for their progeny. So even as CBSE spokespersons stridently condemned the scandal, the nation’s largest all-India examination board had to suffer the embarrassment of the AIPMT paper leak being traced to its own office. One of its employees, Hemant Sharma, a computer assistant in the office of the controller of examinations, had printed additional copies of the exam paper and sold them to Verma and several coaching centres.

CBI investigations have also unearthed the always-suspected involvement of private tuition and coaching schools which are ubiquitous in all towns and cities across the country. Established without let or hindrance in pursuance of the great Indian quest for ‘merit-based’ admissions into the too-few professional (medical, engineering) institutes and institutions of excellence, coaching schools depend upon their success records in public entrance exams for survival and prosperity. And it’s hardly a national secret that most of them pull out all the stops to ensure their students are among the 1-3 percent who make it into institutions of academic excellence.

To complicate matters further, even as the CBI remanded Sharma, the Verma brothers, Gautam, Thaplu and half-a-dozen other accomplices to police custody following a nation-wide search operation, the bureau suffered its own embarrass-ment following the discovery that one of its own officers — Sanjay Gupta, the chief investigating officer probing the AIPMT paper leaks — had attempted to extort Rs.20 lakh from Ranjit Verma’s father by threatening to implicate other members of the family in the case. A deal was struck for Rs.6.5 lakh, but not before Verma had taped the entire conversation and tipped off the CBI who laid a trap for Gupta. It also came to light that Gupta had demanded a massive Rs.20 crore from Sudhir Siddhwa and Sudhir Sachdeva, principal and proprietor respectively of the Sachdeva New P.T. College, both of whom are co-accused in the case.

This huge imbroglio and its wide ripple effect which provides an insight into massive corruption within the education system is — belatedly — causing anguish and introspection within academia. "Why is there insistence upon persisting with archaic exam systems evolved to suit the requirements of the 1950s? We need to devise a new contemporary and decentralised exam system. These recurrent leaks of question papers are a desperate call for a total revamp of the system," says Prof. Kapil Kumar of the Indira Gandhi National Open University.

Even as the newly appointed Union minister of HRD, Arjun Singh gets down to the task of cleansing the augean stables of the ministry, one of his priorities should be to rationalise the system of leaky pan-India examinations which threaten the future of millions of hopeful young citizens across the subcontinent.

Neeta Lal (Delhi)

Misdirected zeal?

In Maharashtra, government and aided schools have been suffering one upheaval after the other for the past couple of years, ranging from the state government imposing a means tested fee structure upon aided English medium schools in early 2002, to rampant cheating and mass copying in the Maharashtra Secondary School Certificate (SSC) board examinations earlier this year, (see EW April p.14). But Mumbai’s second tier, next best (i.e unaffiliated to CISCE or CBSE) schools recently experienced perhaps the most unkindest cut of all, which has jolted students from low-income group households.

Last month (May) an estimated 1,000 students — most of them first generation learners — suffered a rude shock when the state government’s education inspector (west zone), issued a list of 15 ‘unauthorised’ schools in Mumbai which will be closed down. And, according to sources in the education department, this is just for starters. "As per our estimate there are approximately 400 schools in the city which are in pathetic condition. They are playing around with the futures of their students," says Arundhati Chavan, the plucky president of the Parent Teacher Association United Forum (PTAUF), which forced an inspection of unauthorised schools.

"We have been receiving complaints from parents regarding the appalling conditions in some schools in the city. Upon investigation, we found numerous such schools, which charge their students tuition fees of Rs.200-300 per month, but are of abysmal quality, some being run out of hutments. Some of these schools offer education upto class IV, others till class IX. But the education provided to students is so poor and inadequate that few schools or colleges will accept them thereafter. With teachers who have just completed their high school education, what can you expect? Moreover they are unauthorised and totally unrecognised institutions," says Chavan.

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But though there is a good case for cracking down on unscrupulous entre-preneurs who are blatantly commercialising education and ripping off poor, ignorant citizens (quite obviously in collaboration with education department inspectors), at a deeper level the promotion of a growing number of private schools offering bare minimum facilities and education is a scathing indictment of Mumbai’s 1,200 government schools, many of whom report excess capacity. Quite evidently the public perception is that academic and infrastructure standards in government schools are even worse than in unrecognised private schools which have aroused the wrath of PTAUF.

Perhaps the forum needs to look into them as well.

Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)

Confusing clarification

Almost a year after the Supreme Court in Islamic Academy vs Union of India (6 SCC 697) ordered the formation of two judicial committees to regulate fees and admissions into privately-promoted professional (engineering, medical and dental) colleges across the country, the admission and fees processes in Karnataka’s professional colleges remains steeped in confusion.

The 132,000 students who wrote their entrance test(s) in mid-May are still uncertain about which college they will enter and at what price. After writing the government’s Common Entrance Test (CET) on May 18-19 and the private colleges’ Comed-K test on May 14-15, they are now worried about the government-management seat sharing formula. Last year 75 percent of all the 42,798 engineering, medical and dental college seats were allotted to school leavers (class XII) who wrote the state government’s CET. This year following the Supreme Court’s historic judgement in the TMA Pai Foundation Case in 2002, 70 private professional colleges grouped under the banner of the Consortium of Medical, Engineering and Dental Colleges-Karnataka (Comed-K) are demanding that 50 percent of seats in every private unaided college should be allotted to students who top Comed-K’s own test as per the Supreme Court’s sanction in the Islamic Academy Case.

"The seat sharing formula between the state government and private colleges is important because if last year’s 75-25 percent ratio is maintained CET students will have a larger quota i.e 100 percent of seats in CET affiliated colleges and 75 percent in Comed-K colleges. On the other hand if the formula is 50:50, students who have written only CET will have a smaller quota. I have written only the CET because I hope to get admitted into a government college where the tuition fee is very low," says N. Guru Prasad, a graduate of Seshadripuram Composite PU College, Bangalore.

But officials at the CET cell feel that such fears are unwarranted. "Comed-K offers a total of 13,660 medical, engineering and dental seats, while 107 colleges affiliated with CET offer 29,138 seats. Therefore even if 50:50 seat sharing formula is negotiated, CET students will have access to 35,968 of the total 42,798 seats in professional colleges in Karnataka. Hence it makes better sense for aspiring doctors, dentists and engineers to write CET and forget about Comed-K. Without studying the issue properly the media is blowing it out of proportion and creating confusion," says C.M. Jamal admini-strative officer of the Karnataka government’s CET cell.

CET students in Bangalore: admission and fees anxieties

A satisfactory seat sharing formula apart, students are anxious because the tuition fee payable by them is yet to be finalised. As mandated by the apex court in the Islamic Academy & Ors, another committee headed by justice A.M. Murgod was constituted to mandate the tuition fee leviable by each one of the 169 privately promoted professional education colleges in Karnataka. But the understaffed five-member Murgod committee is deluged with paper from colleges. According to committee sources every college has submitted fee calculation proposals of 300-500 pages. "It will take us at least six-eight months to study all these proposals and fix a reasonable tuition fee chargeable by each college. Thus far we have decreed the fees of only seven colleges for their postgraduate programmes. With regard to undergraduate fees, before admissions begin in mid-June, we will recommend an interim fee payable to all private medical, dental and engineering colleges. The final tuition fees of each professional college will be announced by the commencement of the next academic year," says an official of the Murgod committee.

In the light of this chaos and confusion surrounding professional education in Karnataka (only 5 percent of 42,798 professional education seats in Karnataka are offered by government colleges) educationists are ruing the ‘clarification’ judgement of the Supreme Court in the Islamic Academy Case which ‘explained’ the full bench apex court judgement in the TMA Pai Foundation Case. "In the TMA Pai Foundation Case the Supreme Court freed private citizens to ‘establish and administer’ their education institutions. The clarification Islamic Academy judgement should at best have established the fees and admission committees as courts of appeal for aggrieved students. Instead the smaller bench judgement has deluged the admission and fees committees with paper work and confusion," says a disillusioned promoter of a private engineering college.

Moral of the story: If it ain’t broke don’t try and fix it.

Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore)