A slew of student suicides across Maharashtra and Mumbai in particular — over 25 children and youth in the state have committed suicide since January — has once again focused the attention of the commercial capital’s aspirational middle class on the stress-inducing examination system, especially school-leaving board exams. It has also prompted overdue intro-spection of high and exaggerated parental expectations which contribute to driving children over the edge.
While student suicides are not uncommon during board exams and tend to peak around the time when results are announced, the new year student suicides epidemic is one of the most virulent in recent memory. Local dailies and television channels feature a plethora of parenting experts — psychologists, sociologists, psychia-trists and sundry academics — blaming pushy parents, indifferent teachers, careless examiners, the ‘system’ and even the Bollywood superhit 3 Idiots, which despite its positive message about hands-on learning and pursuit of dreams, is accused of indirectly advocating suicide as a means of escaping or indicting the system.
Taking serious note of the spate of student suicides, chief minister Ashok Chavan has constituted a committee headed by the education minister to investigate the phenomenon and suggest remedial measures. The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education has also bestirred itself and is reportedly examining options to make the board exams less stressful, starting with a proposed ‘best of 5’ formula for junior college (class XI) admissions. Under this formula students writing the class X SSC/ICSE/CBSE board exam can choose their five best subjects for writing the exam with language papers (Marathi and English) compulsory. Moreover Fauzia Khan, Maharashtra’s education minister, has also ordered a review of the state board syllabus, to relieve exam stress.
On a larger canvas, educators in Mumbai believe that the standardisation of the syllabuses/curriculums of core subjects — maths, science, English — as proposed by Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal will reduce students’ exam stress. Mrs. S. Ganguly, headmistress of the Cathedral and John Connon Junior School, Mumbai, says the common curriculum concept will create a level playing field and “help alleviate student anxiety”.
However Minnie K. Dastur, a Mumbai-based psychoanalyst/child psychotherapist who has been counseling parents and students in the city for the past 30 years, advises parents to create supportive and caring home environments to reduce exam-related stress. “Each suicide is not only an attack upon the unsuccessful self, but also an attack on parents and teachers, who are seen to be belittling or criticising the child’s ability and personality. Attributing the rising incidence of student suicides to exams stress is over-simplification of a complex issue,” she says.
Although most learned analyses of board exam-related suicides have failed to discern the prime cause thereof — the severe and accentuating shortage of quality higher education institutions among the country’s 431 universities and 21,000 colleges, which is intensifying the pressure on school-leavers to excel in board exams — middle class focus on the issue is a welcome silver lining. It offers hope that awareness will eventually dawn.
Nisha Khiani (Mumbai)
Fading euphoria
When the free mid-day meal scheme for government primary school children, the brain-child of the much admired and revered movie star chief minister of Tamil Nadu, the late M.G. Ramachandran (1917-1987), was rolled out nationally in 2001, there was much euphoria and great expectations of a countrywide learning explosion. Today even though India runs the largest school mid-day meal programme worldwide for 120 million children, these expectations have been belied. According to the Annual Status of Education Report 2009 compiled by the highly-respected Mumbai-based NGO Pratham, very little learning happens in government prima-ries, especially in rural India with 47 percent of children in class VII unable to do class II level sums and compositions.
Gradually it’s dawning on government and academia that while the free mid-day meal has improved the gross enrolment ratio in primary schools countrywide, it takes much more to keep children in school and help them learn. It’s also becoming increasingly apparent that implementation of the well-intentioned mid-day meal scheme by the country’s notoriously indifferent government school teachers and support staff communities leaves much to be desired. And even as reports of government school children fleeing to fees-charging private schools regularly make headlines in the media, complaints about the poor quality and hygiene of mid-day meals being dispensed in government primaries in Pune (pop.5 million), Maharashtra’s second largest city, are being given banner headlines in the local press.
In the first week of February, Poornima Kale (8), a student of a primary run by the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), suffered acute food poisoning after eating the school’s mid-day meal. Earlier in September last year, a Pune-based NGO, Dnyana Devi (which runs Childline, a 24-hour helpline for children in distress) filed a complaint with the education department that the food provided to children under the mid-day meal scheme is tasteless and often contaminated. “We had given a written complaint stating that the meal served to students of the PMC-run Sant Dnyaneshwar School at Yerwada on September 9 and 10 was found to be full of worms. This was on the basis of information obtained from the students,” says Anuradha Sahasra-buddhe, founder-director of Childline.
With the local newspapers awash with reports of the poor quality of mid-day meals, your correspondent interviewed about 50 children studying in several PMC-run schools in the city. Most of them expressed dissatisfaction. “My mother feels that the meal served in our school is not nutritious, so I bring my own tiffin,” says Rupali Jadhav (10). “There is no taste in the food provided by our school,” complains Kshitij Mane (12).
With the media routinely reporting cases of food poisoning from across Maharashtra (pop. 99 million) and children complaining about tasteless meals, educationists in this university town are debating whether serving the mid-day meal in urban schools serves any purpose at all. “Mid-day meals are routinely being served in schools to students who aren’t from impoverished backgrounds. A huge amount of food and money is being wasted in the process,” says Sahasrabuddhe.
Against this backdrop, some quasi-government (aided) schools covered under the mid-day meal scheme have decided to opt out. “We asked to be exempted from the scheme at the behest of parents. It was a burden serving up to 1,600 children each day and then cleaning up for two hours while maintaining a supplies register and retaining samples of the meals cooked each day,” says Nanda Mane, principal, primary section of the Nutan Marathi Vidyalaya at Sadashiv Peth.
Consequently given that 5,408 government and aided schools in Pune district are covered by the mid-day meal scheme at a massive cost to the PMC of Rs.22.43 crore per year, a consensus is emerging among educators that the scheme should be voluntary and target only the poorest students in urban schools. “The scheme is designed to work in rural rather than urban areas,” says Ingrid Mendonca, member-activist of the NGO Action for the Rights of the Child (ARC). “In urban habitats it should be implemented as a targeted rather than universal programme to eliminate wastage and corruption.”
But switching to a targeted subsidi-sation programme would create additional work for PMC’s education department employees who are always so busy that they are seldom accessible.
Huned Contractor (Pune)